Why do I have to do assessment?
Think of some of the real questions you have about your curriculum and how well your students are doing, questions such as:
- How strong are our students' research skills?
- Can our students apply what they are learning outside of class?
- How motivated are our students to learn on their own?
- If our students can choose from a wide variety of electives, are they leaving our department or program with the same skills and knowledge, or does what they learn vary greatly from student to student?
- By the time our students are seniors, are they ready for their final courses or do some seem to have gaps in what they've learned?
- Do our introductory courses attempt to cover too much?
- Should we revise the sequence of our courses to enable students to learn more effectively?
These questions—and others like them—reflect the real concerns that faculty have about the effectiveness of their curricula. Finding answers to such questions is one of the most important roles for assessment.
In addition to finding ways to help our students learn more effectively, assessment results can provide data for fund raising, for grant writing, for recruiting students, and for demonstrating the quality of our programs.
Aren't grades assessment?
Yes and no. In general, Instructors assign grades based upon what individual students accomplished in their classes. Whereas an assessment program is designed to determine how well and/or how much students as a group have learned as a result of going through an entire program or department.
It is possible that the instructors will discover that there are gaps in the students' learning, no matter how well individual courses were taught. It is possible that instructors teaching common courses may emphasize different learning outcomes, and so students who took the same courses from different instructors may have learned different things. It is also possible that certain learning outcomes were introduced, reinforced, and expceted across a number of courses in a department or program. Lastly, it is possible that students forget what they learn in their classes.
Assessment is designed to determine whether the program or department is accomplishing what the insructors intend it to accomplish. Instructors as a group, often in conjunction with the director of assessment, look at the results of assessment, analyze them, determine whether anything has to be changed to make their program or dpartment more effective, and implement those changes.
There are however, examples of situations when grades (and other evaluations of students) have been used for assessment purposes. If your program or department is interested in utilizing grades for assessment purposes, Walvoord and Anderson's Effective Grading (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998) offers some suggestions.
Have an assessment question you would like answered?
E-mail assessment@agnesscott.edu.