Washington, D.C. -- As the movement to assess student learning continues to win converts, proponents are striving to show that assessment should not be an end in itself but can be used to improve what goes on in college classrooms.
Eight in ten colleges and universities report they have some sort of assessment activity under way, according to early findings from “Campus Trends, 1990,” a survey conducted annually by the American Council on Education. About 85 per cent said they were using assessment to evaluate their academic programs or curricula.
But the message at the fifth annual conference on Assessment in Higher Education, where the survey findings were presented, was that campuses must use the data they are gathering about students to improve teaching and learning. More than 1,400 administrators, professors, and state officials gathered here for the meeting, which was sponsored by the American Association for Higher Education.
In past years, assessment practitioners sought to help campus officials deal with such problems as how to get started and how to win over faculty members to the idea, said Barbara Wright, director of the AAHE Assessment Forum, which organized the meeting.
“Some colleges are still at this stage,” Ms. Wright said. “But lots of others are asking different questions. There’s a much heavier focus now on what works and what doesn’t, and how to use assessment to improve education.”
The assessment movement, as its proponents call it, has become more sophisticated, she and other observers at the conference said. More and more institutions are creating new positions in their administrations for “directors of assessment.” In addition, more campuses are developing their own assessment tools rather than relying solely on standardized tests.
While 8 in 10 colleges report they are doing something with assessment, only a third of the institutions in another survey said they were operating a comprehensive program to measure student learning and development.
Preliminary results of the survey -- the first to take an in-depth look at campus programs -- were released at the conference. The survey was conducted by the American Council on Education and Winthrop College, and a report on it is expected in the fall.
Questionnaires were sent to 460 institutions, ranging from research universities to community colleges. Nearly 80 per cent responded.
Of the institutions with assessment programs, 94 per cent said they were evaluating basic skills, 67 per cent were assessing general education and liberal studies, and 62 per cent were measuring students’ progress in their majors.
Just over 80 per cent of the institutions with assessment programs were using commercially developed tests to assess basic skills, while 52 per cent also were designing their own exams to measure such skills.
In measuring student progress in general-education studies, such as the humanities and natural sciences, 38 per cent of the campuses said they were using standardized tests and 24 per cent were using performance assessments that require students to demonstrate and apply what they have learned.
When it came to assessing students in their majors, 38 per cent of the campuses said they had developed their own tests and 37 per cent used performance assessments. Only 27 per cent reported using standardized tests.
State officials who push colleges and universities to measure how well their students are being taught are not the enemies of higher education, said Peter T. Ewell, a higher-education consultant. In fact, he added, they are probably the colleges’ biggest allies.
Mr. Ewell, who studies state policies and political attitudes toward assessment, reported that in many of the states he had visited, politicians had been able to use assessment as a bargaining chip to win over “doubting colleagues.”
He cited Hawaii and Washington as two examples of states where college budgets were increased in recent years after legislators were assured that the institutions would initiate programs to measure student learning.
Still, Mr. Ewell noted, the assessment movement could expose colleges to some political damage. Some legislators “are genuinely puzzled that we don’t do this already,” he said, and that leaves them uneasy about higher-education’s overall interest in serving students. Eventually, he reminded his audience, colleges must show their governors and legislators in concrete ways how they are using their assessment results to improve teaching and campus life.
In the “what works” department, many colleges are turning to an approach called “classroom assessment.” In it, individual faculty members use techniques to evaluate their own teaching and their students’ learning and to make adjustments based on what they discover.
The techniques were developed by K. Patricia Cross, a professor of higher education at the University of California at Berkeley, and director of “The Classroom Research Project.” Thomas A. Angelo, assistant director of the project at Berkeley who helped develop the approach, said classroom assessment meant “not just accepting that students are learning by whether they nod and smile.”
“It means catching learning problems before students are tested,” he added.
Classroom assessment can be as simple as stopping in the middle of a class session to ask students, “What is the muddiest thing you have heard so far today?” Or it can be assigning students at the end of class to write a “one-minute” paper, in which they are given 60 seconds to write about the most important thing they learned in class that day.
Among the colleges where faculty members are using classroom assessment are the College of Marin, King’s College of Pennsylvania, and a consortium of four institutions in Southern California led by Rio Hondo College. The Berkeley project has developed handbooks and sponsored workshops to teach faculty members how to do classroom research and assessment on their own.
Community colleges face special challenges when they begin programs to measure what their students learn -- particularly when the results show that a high proportion of their students are not able to do college-level work.
With a large corps of part-time faculty members, community colleges have a tougher time generating the faculty cooperation to develop assessment programs, said David C. Hanson, director of instructional support services at Virginia Western Community College. And because so many students are adults who often stop out for several semesters while attending to family or work obligations, tracking their academic progress creates extra logistical difficulties, he said.
The colleges face even more complicated educational and political issues once the assessment results are reported. Just ask Ronald A. Williams, assistant executive director of the Connecticut Community College System, which began an assessment program in 1988. The system requires all students to take the same basic-skills test when they enter college; by 1991, each campus is expected to begin its own program to measure what their students have learned.
“The fiction” of the system was that 40 per cent of the students would require remedial courses, said Mr. Williams, but the testing showed that the figure was greater than 50 per cent, and far higher at some inner-city institutions.
Although the results can create a bad image for colleges Mr. Williams said the testing could ultimately improve students’ chances of completing their education because colleges will know how extensive a remedial program they need to develop. Before assessment, said Mr. Williams, ill-prepared students took classes, did poorly, and “then they would just drop out.”
Finding the additional money to create those remedial programs, however, can often be tricky.
Mr. Williams said education leaders could remind legislators that if they failed to provide remedial courses to students who needed them, “it’s no longer the individual student that’s being hurt, its the state as a whole.” And because some of those community-college students eventually will take the basic technical and clerical jobs that business finds so difficult to fill, Mr. Williams suggested that a “good strategy for any state is to ally itself with business leaders” when going to the legislature for additional money.