The assessment movement, which began as a way for institutions to forestall government interference and to demonstrate their quality, recently gained steam on my campus. A review by our accreditor required us to more deliberately assess student learning.
The faculty and administrative response was, initially, quite positive. We appointed a new committee, and it got to work quickly, mandating that we adopt “Student Learning Outcomes,” or SLO’s, for our majors, minors, and core program. Again, most faculty members accepted that task with little protest. What harm could come from articulating our goals and objectives to our students? We rationalized that whatever inconveniences fell upon us, at least we did not have to comply with a postsecondary version of No Child Left Behind. We had the privilege of self-regulation—academics policing academics.
Yet in the midst of reflecting on what our students should do and know, we found ourselves acting out a scene from George Orwell’s 1984. Adopting the correct “assessment” language seemed to take priority, and we circulated lists of approved and forbidden action verbs.
One such list made the rounds via faculty e-mail. On the forbidden list, under the heading “terms to avoid when writing instructional goals and objectives,” were the words “know,” “understand,” “comprehend,” and “appreciate.” Those things, according to the experts, could not be directly observed and measured and, thus, were not legitimate objectives for our students. On the list of approved verbs: “alphabetize,” “cut,” “kick,” “paint,” “swing,” and “ski.”
I played a game of educational Mad Libs, replacing my old, forbidden verbs with those from the approved list. Instead of “knowing” something about people from different cultures and backgrounds, my students could “kick” or “hit” them. Instead of “understanding” theories of human behavior, my students could “alphabetize” them. Perhaps my students could learn to “ski” through competing viewpoints and perspectives.
My college’s assessment committee, with the backing of the administration, soon mandated that department chairs submit new SLO’s for each program, which the committee carefully edited and checked for proper language. The Academic Council followed suit, checking new course proposals for the approved verbs. While the mandatory revisions were not as colorful as my Mad Libs experiment, they often minimized the power of the learning objectives, reducing “understanding” of concepts to a mere listing of those concepts.
Although the goal of assessment is to improve teaching and learning, some faculty members argued that, in an effort to articulate what we could most easily measure, our new learning objectives actually reduced and narrowed our expectations of students.
As I defended the forbidden verbs, in faculty forums and in e-mails to members of the Academic Council, I tried to remember the purpose of the accountability and assessment movement. Critics had not merely asked colleges and universities to demonstrate that students could do something. Rather, they asked us to justify rising costs and show that four years of tuition delivered on our promise to prepare graduates for life and work beyond the campus.
The public is not demanding evidence of learning as much as it is demanding evidence of efficiency. Recent studies by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education demonstrate that Americans continue to place considerable confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities yet believe that a quality education could be made more affordable.
But institutions of higher education have chosen to ignore the efficiency aspect of accountability. The mere creation of committees, comprised of professors and college administrators, charged with reviewing course syllabi for approved verbs, is not an efficient use of institutional resources.
A critical examination of assessment activities on many campuses will demonstrate that debating lists of approved verbs is merely one example of the overbureaucratization that has accompanied institutional assessment. Yet assessment activities themselves appear to be immune from the requirement that outcomes be directly measurable or “assessed.” Do students learn more now that all syllabi are written with measurable action verbs?
If the time and effort spent on institutional assessment actually produced the sort of accountability that the public demanded, perhaps the hours and resources would be justified. Yet colleges and universities have been allowed to tailor their own, individual assessment plans. While that does have the benefit of allowing us to adapt measures that fit our own missions and visions, it also creates a highly decentralized system of assessment that fails to provide the type of comparative data necessary for real accountability.
According to the 2006 Spellings Commission report, which called for increasing access and transparency in higher education, accountability and assessment would serve the purpose of allowing prospective students to compare outcomes across colleges and universities. Like nutritional labels on packaged food, institutional data would be readily available and allow consumers to make informed choices. But the vast majority of assessment activities provide no standardized data, and consumers are left with the same sort of arbitrary measures of institutional quality and performance that the Spellings Commission criticized more than four years ago.
The mere mention of standardized measures of student learning will undoubtedly generate protest from the academic community, whose members fear they would involve government control of higher education, akin to No Child Left Behind. No doubt, academics place tremendous value on their freedom and autonomy. However, the assessment movement means that faculty members at many institutions have already surrendered some autonomy, and have done so with little purpose, as our activities fail to generate the sort of evidence that legislatures and others have demanded.
It is, of course, useful to measure student learning to improve our own educational programs. But professors are assessing student learning every day, as we grade papers, assignments, and exams. Good professors know what their students are learning and adapt their teaching when students fail to demonstrate adequate mastery of the material.
If we are to remain competitive as a nation, we must raise our standards and expectations of students. Yet institutional assessment activities, as currently structured, contradict the intentions of those who demanded accountability, by placing unnecessary burdens on our resources, by demanding that faculty members take time away from students and teaching to do what amounts to busy work, and by lowering institutional standards for student performance.
If the goal of institutional assessment is merely to distract external critics from their real demands, then the diversion appears to be working, at least for the time being.
However, if we in academe honestly desire to be free of external control, we will eventually need to recognize and deal with the public’s primary concern—the rising cost of higher education.
