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Sarah Usher

One Step Closer to My Dream - 3 views

My father was a police officer and he died protecting people and making this world a better place. All my life, I always wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and follow a path with police care...

police careers assessment education accountability higher_education

started by Sarah Usher on 01 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Sarah Usher

One Step Closer to My Dream - 3 views

My father was a police officer and he died protecting people and making this world a better place. All my life, I always wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and follow a path with police care...

police careers assessment education accountability

started by Sarah Usher on 01 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Joshua Yeidel

The Answer Sheet - A principal on standardized vs. teacher-written tests - 0 views

voices.washingtonpost.com/...ongress-should-end-relian.html

assessment outcomes accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11
     
    High school principal George Wood eloquently contrasts standardized NCLB-style testing with his school's performance assessments.
Joshua Yeidel

Performance Assessment | The Alternative to High Stakes Testing - 0 views

performanceassessment.org

assessment outcomes accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11
     
    " The New York Performance Standards Consortium represents 28 schools across New York State. Formed in 1997, the Consortium opposes high stakes tests arguing that "one size does not fit all." Despite skepticism that an alternative to high stakes tests could work, the New York Performance Standards Consortium has done just that...developed an assessment system that leads to quality teaching, that enhances rather than compromises our students' education. Consortium school graduates go on to college and are successful."
Joshua Yeidel

Higher Education: Assessment & Process Improvement Group News | LinkedIn - 0 views

www.linkedin.com/news

assessment outcomes accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 06 Jan 11
     
    High School Principal George Wood eloquently contrasts standardized NCLB-style testing and his school's term-end performance testing.
Gary Brown

A Final Word on the Presidents' Student-Learning Alliance - Measuring Stick - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...27535

accreditation.

shared by Gary Brown on 22 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • I was very pleased to see the responses to the announcement of the Presidents’ Alliance as generally welcoming (“commendable,” “laudatory initiative,” “applaud”) the shared commitment of these 71 founding institutions to do more—and do it publicly and cooperatively—with regard to gathering, reporting, and using evidence of student learning.
  • establishing institutional indicators of educational progress that could be valuable in increasing transparency may not suggest what needs changing to improve results
  • As Adelman’s implied critique of the CLA indicates, we may end up with an indicator without connections to practice.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Presidents’ Alliance’s focus on and encouragement of institutional efforts is important to making these connections and steps in a direct way supporting improvement.
  • Second, it is hard to disagree with the notion that ultimately evidence-based improvement will occur only if faculty members are appropriately trained and encouraged to improve their classroom work with undergraduates.
  • Certainly there has to be some connection between and among various levels of assessment—classroom, program, department, and institution—in order to have evidence that serves both to aid improvement and to provide transparency and accountability.
  • Presidents’ Alliance is setting forth a common framework of “critical dimensions” that institutions can use to evaluate and extend their own efforts, efforts that would include better reporting for transparency and accountability and greater involvement of faculty.
  • there is wide variation in where institutions are in their efforts, and we have a long way to go. But what is critical here is the public commitment of these institutions to work on their campuses and together to improve the gathering and reporting of evidence of student learning and, in turn, using evidence to improve outcomes.
  • The involvement of institutions of all types will make it possible to build a more coherent and cohesive professional community in which evidence-based improvement of student learning is tangible, visible, and ongoing.
Gary Brown

Home - Journal of Assessment and Accountability Systems in Educator Preparation - 1 views

www.uni.edu/...current.html

Assessment accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 16 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Gary Brown on 16 Nov 10
     
    a new journal to note
Gary Brown

Views: Asking Too Much (and Too Little) of Accreditors - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...neal

accreditation

shared by Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Senators want to know why accreditors haven’t protected the public interest.
  • Congress shouldn’t blame accreditors: it should blame itself. The existing accreditation system has neither ensured quality nor ferreted out fraud. Why? Because Congress didn’t want it to. If Congress truly wants to protect the public interest, it needs to create a system that ensures real accountability.
  • But turning accreditors into gatekeepers changed the picture. In effect, accreditors now held a gun to the heads of colleges and universities since federal financial aid wouldn’t flow unless the institution received “accredited” status.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Congress listened to higher education lobbyists and designated accreditors -- teams made up largely of administrators and faculty -- to be “reliable authorities” on educational quality. Intending to protect institutional autonomy, Congress appropriated the existing voluntary system by which institutions differentiated themselves.
  • A gatekeeping system using peer review is like a penal system that uses inmates to evaluate eligibility for parole. The conflicts of interest are everywhere -- and, surprise, virtually everyone is eligible!
  • accreditation is “premised upon collegiality and assistance; rather than requirements that institutions meet certain standards (with public announcements when they don’t."
  • Meanwhile, there is ample evidence that many accredited colleges are adding little educational value. The 2006 National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that nearly a third of college graduates were unable to compare two newspaper editorials or compute the cost of office items, prompting the Spellings Commission and others to raise concerns about accreditors’ attention to productivity and quality.
  • But Congress wouldn’t let them. Rather than welcoming accreditors’ efforts to enhance their public oversight role, Congress told accreditors to back off and let nonprofit colleges and universities set their own standards for educational quality.
  • ccreditation is nothing more than an outdated industrial-era monopoly whose regulations prevent colleges from cultivating the skills, flexibility, and innovation that they need to ensure quality and accountability.
  • there is a much cheaper and better way: a self-certifying regimen of financial accountability, coupled with transparency about graduation rates and student success. (See some alternatives here and here.)
  • Such a system would prioritize student and parent assessment over the judgment of institutional peers or the educational bureaucracy. And it would protect students, parents, and taxpayers from fraud or mismanagement by permitting immediate complaints and investigations, with a notarized certification from the institution to serve as Exhibit A
  • The only way to protect the public interest is to end the current system of peer review patronage, and demand that colleges and universities put their reputation -- and their performance -- on the line.
  • Anne D. Neal is president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The views stated herein do not represent the views of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, of which she is a member.
  • Gary Brown on 12 Nov 10
     
    The ascending view of accreditation.
Theron DesRosier

The Future of Work: As Gartner Sees It - 3 views

www.upsidelearning.com/...ure-of-work-as-gartner-sees-it

future work assessment education

shared by Theron DesRosier on 10 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 10 Nov 10
     
    "Gartner points out that the world of work will probably witness ten major changes in the next ten years. Interesting in that it will change how learning happens in the workplace as well. The eLearning industry will need to account for the coming change and have a strategy in place to deal with the changes."
Gary Brown

71 Presidents Pledge to Improve Their Colleges' Teaching and Learning - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...125285

accountability

shared by Gary Brown on 05 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • In a venture known as the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability, they have promised to take specific steps to gather more evidence about student learning, to use that evidence to improve instruction, and to give the public more information about the quality of learning on their campuses.
  • The 71 pledges, officially announced on Friday, are essentially a dare to accreditors, parents, and the news media: Come visit in two years, and if we haven't done these things, you can zing us.
  • deepen an ethic of professional stewardship and self-regulation among college leaders
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Beginning in 2011, all first-year students at Westminster will be required to create electronic portfolios that reflect their progress in terms of five campuswide learning goals. And the college will expand the number of seniors who take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, so that the test can be used to help measure the strength of each academic major.
  • "The crucial thing is that all of our learning assessments have been designed and driven by the faculty," says Pamela G. Menke, Miami Dade's associate provost for academic affairs. "The way transformation of learning truly occurs is when faculty members ask the questions, and when they're willing to use what they've found out to make change.
  • Other assessment models might point some things out, but they won't be useful if faculty members don't believe in them."
  • "In the long term, as more people join, I hope that the Web site will provide a resource for the kinds of innovations that seem to be successful," he says. "That process might be difficult. Teaching is an art, not a science. But there is still probably a lot that we can learn from each other."
Gary Brown

Does testing for statistical significance encourage or discourage thoughtful data analysis? « Genuine Evaluation - 1 views

genuineevaluation.com/urage-thoughtful-data-analysis

statistics

shared by Gary Brown on 27 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Does testing for statistical significance encourage or discourage thoughtful data analysis? Posted by Patricia Rogers on October 20th, 2010
  • Epidemiology, 9(3):333–337). which argues not only for thoughtful interpretation of findings, but for not reporting statistical significance at all.
  • We also would like to see the interpretation of a study based not on statistical significance, or lack of it, for one or more study variables, but rather on careful quantitative consideration of the data in light of competing explanations for the findings.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • we prefer a researcher to consider whether the magnitude of an estimated effect could be readily explained by uncontrolled confounding or selection biases, rather than simply to offer the uninspired interpretation that the estimated effect is significant, as if neither chance nor bias could then account for the findings.
  • Many data analysts appear to remain oblivious to the qualitative nature of significance testing.
  • statistical significance is itself only a dichotomous indicator.
  • it cannot convey much useful information
  • Even worse, those two values often signal just the wrong interpretation. These misleading signals occur when a trivial effect is found to be ’significant’, as often happens in large studies, or when a strong relation is found ’nonsignificant’, as often happens in small studies.
  • Another useful paper on this issue is Kristin Sainani, (2010) “Misleading Comparisons: The Fallacy of Comparing Statistical Significance”Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Vol. 2 (June), 559-562 which discusses the need to look carefully at within-group differences as well as between-group differences, and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: ‘Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to “spin” null results.”
  • Gary Brown on 27 Oct 10
     
    and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: 'Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to "spin" null results."
Judy Rumph

Views: Why Are We Assessing? - Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...suskie

Assessment

shared by Judy Rumph on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Amid all this progress, however, we seem to have lost our way. Too many of us have focused on the route we’re traveling: whether assessment should be value-added; the improvement versus accountability debate; entering assessment data into a database; pulling together a report for an accreditor. We’ve been so focused on the details of our route that we’ve lost sight of our destinatio
  • Our destination, which is what we should be focusing on, is the purpose of assessment. Over the last decades, we've consistently talked about two purposes of assessment: improvement and accountability. The thinking has been that improvement means using assessment to identify problems — things that need improvement — while accountability means using assessment to show that we're already doing a great job and need no improvement. A great deal has been written about the need to reconcile these two seemingly disparate purposes.
  • The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Our second common purpose of assessment should be making sure not only that students learn what’s important, but that their learning is of appropriate scope, depth, and rigo
  • Third, we need to accept how good we already are, so we can recognize success when we see i
  • And we haven’t figured out a way to tell the story of our effectiveness in 25 words or less, which is what busy people want and nee
  • Because we're not telling the stories of our successful outcomes in simple, understandable terms, the public continues to define quality using the outdated concept of inputs like faculty credentials, student aptitude, and institutional wealth — things that by themselves don’t say a whole lot about student learning.
  • And people like to invest in success. Because the public doesn't know how good we are at helping students learn, it doesn't yet give us all the support we need in our quest to give our students the best possible education.
  • But while virtually every college and university has had to make draconian budget cuts in the last couple of years, with more to come, I wonder how many are using solid, systematic evidence — including assessment evidence — to inform those decisions.
  • Now is the time to move our focus from the road we are traveling to our destination: a point at which we all are prudent, informed stewards of our resources… a point at which we each have clear, appropriate, justifiable, and externally-informed standards for student learning. Most importantly, now is the time to move our focus from assessment to learning, and to keeping our promises. Only then can we make higher education as great as it needs to be.
  • Kimberly Green on 27 Oct 10
     
    Yes, this article resonnated with me too. Especially connecting assessment to teaching and learning. The most important purpose of assessment should be not improvement or accountability but their common aim: everyone wants students to get the best possible education.... today we seem to be devoting more time, money, thought, and effort to assessment than to helping faculty help students learn as effectively as possible. When our colleagues have disappointing assessment results, and they don't know what to do to improve them, I wonder how many have been made aware that, in some respects, we are living in a golden age of higher education, coming off a quarter-century of solid research on practices that promote deep, lasting learning. I wonder how many are pointed to the many excellent resources we now have on good teaching practices, including books, journals, conferences and, increasingly, teaching-learning centers right on campus. I wonder how many of the graduate programs they attended include the study and practice of contemporary research on effective higher education pedagogies. No wonder so many of us are struggling to make sense of our assessment results! Too many of us are separating work on assessment from work on improving teaching and learning, when they should be two sides of the same coin. We need to bring our work on teaching, learning, and assessment together.
Matthew Tedder

Accountable Talk: (Un)intended Consequences - 2 views

www.accountabletalk.com/...uninteded-consequences.html

education

shared by Matthew Tedder on 25 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Matthew Tedder on 25 Oct 10
     
    Nutty method of teacher evaluation
Joshua Yeidel

News: Measuring 2-Year Students' Success - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...data

assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 21 Oct 10
     
    Measuring student success for federal purposes in community colleges -- and only one passing mention of learning. The factory model prevails -- stamp that widget (student) and send it out the door (they sell themselves!)
Theron DesRosier

Assessing Learning Outcomes at the University of Cincinnati: Comparing Rubric Assessments to Standardized Tests - 2 views

www.aacu.org/...feature.cfm

CLA assessment accountability

shared by Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10
     
    "When the CLA results arrived eight months later, the UC team compared the outcomes of the two assessments. "We found no statistically significant correlation between the CLA scores and the portfolio scores," Escoe says. "In some ways, it's a disappointing finding. If we'd found a correlation, we could tell faculty that the CLA, as an instrument, is measuring the same things that we value and that the CLA can be embedded in a course. But that didn't happen." There were many factors that may have contributed to the lack of correlation, she says, including the fact that the CLA is timed, while the rubric assignments are not; and that the rubric scores were diagnostic and included specific feedback, while the CLA awarded points "in a black box": if a student referred to a specific piece of evidence in a critical-thinking question, he or she simply received one point. In addition, she says, faculty members may have had exceptionally high expectations of their honors students and assessed the e-portfolios with those high expectations in mind-leading to results that would not correlate to a computer-scored test. In the end, Escoe says, the two assessments are both useful, but for different things. The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement. "
  • Theron DesRosier on 15 Oct 10
     
    Another institution trying to make sense of the CLA. This study compared student's CLA scores with criteria-based scores of their eportfolios. The study used a modified version of the VALUE rubrics developed by the AACU. Our own Gary Brown was on the team that developed the critical thinking rubric for the VALUE project.
  • Joshua Yeidel on 19 Oct 10
     
    "The CLA can provide broad institutional data that satisfies VSA requirements, while rubric-based assessment provides better information to facilitate continuous program improvement. " This begs some questions: what meaning can we attach to these two non-correlated measures? What VSA requirements can rubric-based assessment NOT satisfy? Are those "requirements" really useful?
Joshua Yeidel

Higher Education: Assessment & Process Improvement Group News | LinkedIn - 2 views

www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=228514267&gid=1171287&type=news&item=228514267&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fnews%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Fnews%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26fd%3DR%26usg%3DAFQjCNFtGpxVvvSMHWFLYe7182CFKjFmIQ%26url%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fchronicle%2Ecom%2

Assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    "Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime."
  • Joshua Yeidel on 18 Oct 10
     
    A philosophical critique of a rapidly-approaching "metric future", with "comensuration" (assigning meaning to measurements) run amok. While the application of student learning outcomes given in the article is not ours, the critique of continuous quality improvement challenges some of our assumptions.
Gary Brown

The Future of Wannabe U. - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124917

outcomes numbers

shared by Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Alice didn't tell me about the topics of her research; instead she listed the number of articles she had written, where they had been submitted and accepted, the reputation of the journals, the data sets she was constructing, and how many articles she could milk from each data set.
  • colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime.
  • higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • annabe administrator noted that the recipient had published well more than 100 articles. He never said why those articles mattered.
  • And all we have are numbers about teaching. And we don't know what the difference is between a [summary measure of] 7.3 and a 7.7 or an 8.2 and an 8.5."
  • The problem is that such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education.
  • or can the many metrics that commonly appear in academic (strategic) plans, like student credit hours per full-time-equivalent faculty member, or the percentage of classes with more than 50 students. Those productivity measures (for they are indeed productivity measures) might as well apply to the assembly-line workers who fabricate the proverbial widget, for one cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge. That includes leading students to the possibility of a fuller life and an appreciation of the world around them and expanding their horizons.
  • But, like the fitness club's expensive cardio machines, a significant increase in faculty research, in the quality of student experiences (including learning), in the institution's service to its state, or in its standing among its peers may cost more than a university can afford to invest or would even dream of paying.
  • Such metrics are a speedup of the academic assembly line, not an intensification or improvement of student learning. Indeed, sometimes a boost in some measures, like an increase in the number of first-year students participating in "living and learning communities," may even detract from what students learn. (Wan U.'s pre-pharmacy living-and-learning community is so competitive that students keep track of one another's grades more than they help one another study. Last year one student turned off her roommate's alarm clock so that she would miss an exam and thus no longer compete for admission to the School of Pharmacy.)
  • Even metrics intended to indicate what students may have learned seem to have more to do with controlling faculty members than with gauging education. Take student-outcomes assessments, meant to be evaluations of whether courses have achieved their goals. They search for fault where earlier researchers would not have dreamed to look. When parents in the 1950s asked why Johnny couldn't read, teachers may have responded that it was Johnny's fault; they had prepared detailed lesson plans. Today student-outcomes assessment does not even try to discover whether Johnny attended class; instead it produces metrics about outcomes without considering Johnny's input.
  • Gary Brown on 18 Oct 10
     
    A good one to wrestle with.  It may be worth formulating distinctions we hold, and steering accordingly.
Joshua Yeidel

GOVT Week: David Bernstein on Top 10 Indicators of Performance Measurement Quality | AEA365 - 2 views

aea365.org/blog

Assessment accountability

shared by Joshua Yeidel on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Joshua Yeidel on 11 Oct 10
     
    Not surprisingly, the #1 indicator of performance measurement quality is "usefulness".
Gary Brown

Conference Highlights Contradictory Attitudes Toward Global Rankings - International - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 2 views

chronicle.com/...124854

rankings

shared by Gary Brown on 08 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • He emphasized, however, that "rankings are only useful if the indicators they use don't just measure things that are easy to measure, but the things that need to be measured."
  • "In Malaysia we do not call it a ranking exercise," she said firmly, saying that the effort was instead a benchmarking exercise that attempts to rate institutions against an objective standard.
  • "If Ranking Is the Disease, Is Benchmarking the Cure?" Jamil Salmi, tertiary education coordinator at the World Bank, said that rankings are "just the tip of the iceberg" of a growing accountability agenda, with students, governments, and employers all seeking more comprehensive information about institutions
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • "Rankings are the most visible and easy to understand" of the various measures, but they are far from the most reliable,
  • Jamie P. Merisotis
  • He described himself as a longtime skeptic of rankings, but noted that "these kinds of forums are useful, because you have to have conversations involving the producers of rankings, consumers, analysts, and critics."
Judy Rumph

Blog U.: It Boils Down to... - Confessions of a Community College Dean - Inside Higher Ed - 4 views

www.insidehighered.com/...it_boils_down_to

Outcomes Assessment accountability

shared by Judy Rumph on 29 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • I had a conversation a few days ago with a professor who helped me understand some of the otherwise-puzzling opposition faculty have shown to actually using the general education outcomes they themselves voted into place.
  • Yet getting those outcomes from ‘adopted’ to ‘used’ has proved a long, hard slog.
  • The delicate balance is in respecting the ambitions of the various disciplines, while still maintaining -- correctly, in my view -- that you can’t just assume that the whole of a degree is equal to the sum of its parts. Even if each course works on its own terms, if the mix of courses is wrong, the students will finish with meaningful gaps. Catching those gaps can help you determine what’s missing, which is where assessment is supposed to come in. But there’s some local history to overcome first.
  • Judy Rumph on 29 Sep 10
     
    This is an interesting take on what we are doing and the comments interesting
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