Some Big Questions About Assessment

05/16/2024

Assessment (uppercase A) in higher education is an interesting animal. In particular, I am thinking about the evolution and the role of Assessment in the California Community Colleges, where I have spent my career teaching and leading. To be clear, Assessment is the formal act of measuring student performance on Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) and reporting them in some kind of formal way.  This is work that is required by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior College, which is the accrediting body for 115 of the 116 public community colleges in California. When I say assessment (lowercase a), I mean the aspect of teaching where, in the most authentic way possible, we ask “Did the student learn the thing that they were supposed to learn?” I’ll go ahead and say the thing that you might be thinking right now - Shouldn’t those be the same thing, or at least have significant overlap? Of course, the answer is yes, and I can tell you that culturally and practically the broad answer seems to be "no".

The Venn diagram of Assessment with assessment in many classes might even show two separate circles, reflective of the idea that one might teach their class, assessing the levels of student knowledge relative to the material they cover, and then at times they also "Do Assessment", measuring and reporting SLO performance using some other measure.

So I have some questions…

If what we teach and assess doesn't lend itself to SLO Assessment, then how do we explain the difference?

SLOs are intended to be the core representation of what we have in the curriculum, right? As in, after a student finishes this class, these are the big things they will have mastered.  In my mind, SLOs should adequately cover the scope of the course, and everything taught in the course should in some way be connected to an SLO.  If that's overreach on my part, then what percentage of the course can be unrelated to SLOs, and how do we come to that?

While I'm on the topic - What is the relationship between grades and assessment? It feels like there should be a very strong correlation between good grades, and good SLO performance.  I wonder how many courses are out there, where it is mathematically possible to Fail the course, but succeed in the SLO assessment, or the other way around. If we consider extra credit, then how does that figure in?  Does that strengthen or weaken this correlation?

Here's a really interesting line from ACCJC's standards: The institution awards course credit, degrees and certificates based on student attainment of learning outcomes. (Standard A.9)

Wait a minute. Based on SLO attainment? What about GRADES? SLO attainment doesn't even show up on the student transcript. It is my understanding that many faculty and schools don't even report individual SLO attainment for each student. So, I have another question: If you don't assess every SLO, for every student, for every section, every semester, then HOW IS IT POSSIBLE to award anything based on SLO attainment? I don't see how it is.

ACCJC's standards also require that "In every class section students receive a course syllabus that includes learning outcomes from the institution’s officially approved course outline." (Standard A.3). I think it's great that we do this - telling students about the big things they will learn on the class allows them to see where they are going. It would be even better if the students could see how these SLOs fit into the overall program SLOs, but that might be a lot to ask for now. So, it makes me wonder – How many students hear about SLOs after they read them on a syllabus? Or, if I can be really abrasive, is there any real value to putting SLOs on the syllabus if the students never hear how they did on them? I know, I know. That would require individual Assessment for every SLO/student/section/term and an effective way to communicate that to students.  Oddly, the tools seem to exist, but the practice and culture do not (in a significant or nearly universal way).

All of these questions beg the bigger question: Why are we doing Assessment?  What is the point of doing this, when grades have served the purpose of telling students how they did for so long?

Based on my limited experience, it seems that grades, in fact, have NOT served their purpose effectively. However, since grades are deeply engrained in our culture ("Hey Ron, nice job on that marketing presentation – A+ work.") and our systems (as the terrible spouse of the worse-than-worthless Carnegie Unit). I believe that it was the recognition that grades are ineffective that spawned Assessment in the first place.

At best, the advent of Assessment was the start of an important conversation.  At worst, it was the layering of a new ineffective system on top of an existing ineffective system. The end result is a weird, academic rendition of dueling banjos.

Wow, I sure did a great job pointing out all the problems, didn't I? Now what?

How do we go from dueling banjos to a way of thinking and teaching where Assessment and assessment are the same thing?  Where we and students know the big things that they need to learn, and where our teaching is focused around developing authentic understanding of what is learned?

That's a worthy discussion to have. I think there are many, many folks out there who have something to contribute to it, and I believe it can be done – it's just going to require some brave steps and some big shifts in how we think about this thing called "education". I'll leave you with one more big question:

What does it look like when Assessment and assessment converge in a meaningful way?