I can say on the basis of personal experience that - at Michigan State University, at Central Michigan University and during a symposium run by a publisher on how to integrate assessment into their products (how I hate that generic term...), the impetus to institute committees, panels, task-forces and textbook and web-resource modifications to "improve" assessment came from administrators, not the faculty. While many faculty may not be sufficiently reflexive about the quality of their teaching, the depth of student learning or the relationship between their tests, quizzes, small-group assignments, essays, blogs, portfolios, etc. the argument is NOT that faculty reject the idea of assessment but they reject the implication - and additional work imposed on us by the administrative assumption - that our assessment tools aren't sufficient and, by implication, that we're not actually teaching our students enough, or anything.
In my experience, faculty are very interested in questions of pedagogy, very interested in issues related to how better to engage students and deepen their understanding, but rarely initiate conversations about how to develop better measures of student learning outcomes, particularly in a world where student opinion surveys and post-tenure review are of increasing importance as administrators and careerist faculty focus less on their students and more on legitimating their existence based on the transfer of largely uncritical, desituated and instrumental technical job skills as the critical social sciences and humanities take it ever more on the funding chin. Furthermore, in my experience good students experience good teaching for months and years after they take a course and, as such, a great deal of what I do is attempt to plant seeds in the minds of my students - alongside teaching the immediate material as well as possible - anticipating that those I reach will have those seeds grow and branch over time... a number of students who've done poorly over 14 weeks end up having things click over the next twelve months and do really well when they take a second class of mine, how am I supposed to assess that according to conventional rubrics?
Furthermore, the conversation between Jeff and I focused less on whether or not improved assessment tools ought to be explored and much more on the constrained arena of assessment styles and techniques - an arena that then constrains pedagogy in many instances - generated by the reification of Bloom's Taxonomy... and especially by uncritical efforts to codify one third - the most vulgar, passive and anormative third - of the Taxonomy in assessment and pedagogy. Jeff and I both see the administration-driven desire for new, improved and discipline-oriented assessment tools as problematic... particularly since I have yet to see anyone produce any evidence that problems with assessment tools lie at the root of the problems extent in higher education.
I don't know about students at Portland State but the major obstacle I experience in teaching sociological concepts, relationships and higher order abstractions has little or nothing to do with my pedagogy or assessment mechanisms and everything to do with the depth of the atomistic individualism, the political cynicism, the economic ignorance, cultural parochialism and soul-deadening and inquisitiveness-crushing primary and secondary school education most of my students arrive with. Why, in this context, university faculty should be told to sit in hour after hour of weekly meetings discussing techniques for embedding Bloom's Taxonomy in our courses, assignments and exams is beyond me... You say we need to develop meaningful strategies for assessing student learning... who says we don't have them? That overwork doesn't make them impossible to use without destroying other aspects of our pedagogy and/or lives? That the problems with faculty teaching ans student learning don't lie mostly outside the classroom and assessment mechanisms?
Alan
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 12:51 AM, <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
> Quoting Joanna <123hop at comcast.net>:
>
> Not just "assessable" but assessable by a bureaucrat and in terms of what
>> a bureaucrat understands: more, faster, bigger, etc. And because the
>> bureaucrat decides what's assessable, he gets to make three times your
>> salary.
>>
>> It is not possible to go along with this. It just isn't.
>>
>
> A little reality check from the front lines. All of the regional college
> and university accrediting bodies in the U. S. require assessment activities
> to be faculty driven. If some notorious faceless administrative bureaucrat
> instituted trivial assessment activities without faculty guidance, said
> college would be given a recommendation by a visiting accreditation
> evaluation team ("recommendation" is an accreditation euphemism for "you
> screwed up, you need to fix this or you will lose your accreditation").
> Given the relative authority of these regional accrediting bodies, it is
> not feasible that something like NCLB could be implemented any time soon at
> the college and university level. College faculty have far more authority
> and control over curriculum than elementary and secondary school teachers
> do.
>
> I have to say I'm fascinated by the claim that assessment of student
> learning is some evil bureaucratic scheme. We need to create meaningful
> strategies for assessing student learning if we want to improve our colleges
> and universities. It's a bit ironic to me that some faculty oppose
> assessment by relying on appeals to their own sacrosanct authority: "I know
> the students in my classes are learning! We don't need any assessment to
> demonstrate that!" As shag would say, klewby4 time: that's an appeal to
> authority, not evidence, and any academic should be embarrassed for even
> implying that authority trumps evidence! --The institutional problem here
> is not the assessment of student learning; rather, the more (dare I say?)
> pernicious problem is the reflexive rejection of the use of evidence to
> guide how we teach our students and design our degree programs.
>
> Miles