What Does Assessment Have to Do with Good Teaching?

By Jack Prostko, Director, Faculty Development Center
Throughout this academic year there will be much campus discussion about the assessment of student learning, given that the Middle States Commission’s recent accreditation report, while extremely positive, included recommendations for increased attention to assessment. President Hrabowski has recently written about the importance of assessment in higher education, and Provost Johnson has announced that he will be forming a university committee to focus on this issue.
For many instructors, assessment means setting standards and testing students against those standards. It doesn’t seem all that different from traditional forms of measuring student success–which results in grades and then grade point averages. How much more specific can assessment get? To a certain extent, there seems to be a lot of fuss about something we already do well enough.
This view of assessment, however, misses the mark. Assessment isn’t just summative evaluation, something that takes place at the end of a process. Assessment is a tool for helping us determine–as we teach and as our students progress through classes and programs–how well (not just how much) our students are learning. At its most effective, assessment provides formative information that helps students know if they are studying properly–and helps teachers know if the strategies we’re using are working.
What good assessment can tell us is whether our teaching is helping students develop independent learning skills–that is if our teaching results in deep rather than surface learning. The distinction between these two approaches to learning is fairly straightforward: “Simply stated, deep learning involves the critical analysis of new ideas, linking them to already known concepts and principles, and leads to understanding and long-term retention of concepts so that they can be used for problem solving in unfamiliar contexts. Deep learning promotes understanding and application for life. In contrast, surface learning is the tacit acceptance of information and memorization as isolated and unlinked facts. It leads to superficial retention of material for examinations and does not promote understanding or long-term retention of knowledge and information.” (The Higher Education Academy, Engineering Subject Centre: Deep and Surface Approaches to Learning)
We’re familiar with this classic distinction, and undoubtedly intend to promote deep learning in our classes. But achieving this goal isn’t simply a matter of doing a rousing job in the classroom of covering or explaining material. We know we intend that our students be more than the sum of all the material they’ve studied in courses; our new General Education requirements demonstrate that we’ve given careful consideration to the skills and aptitudes we expect of our students, and every major program has, to some extent, made efforts to outline the basic cognitive and creative skills and skill levels demanded of their students.
Good teaching, then, starts with being clear in our own minds about what we want students to learn–and letting them know that our learning goals aren’t just about what material needs to be learned, but also what conceptual (or writing or creative) skills will be developed (and how). While this is becoming common practice in some disciplines (engineering or education, for example, because of long-standing accreditation demands), many programs don’t ask faculty to explain what students are expected to get out of a course.
For faculty who want to know more about how to develop comprehensive and explicit learning goals and ways to assess progress toward those goals, there are many resources. One of the best is the brief (33 page) summary of how to create effective courses based on specific learning goals by Dee Fink, available at his Significant Learning Web site. More examples are available in Fink’s excellent book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences, which can be borrowed from the Faculty Development Center (FDC). And later this month, the FDC will sponsor a brownbag panel discussion of this issue (see below for details).
Finally, an essential component of teaching students how to learn more deeply is providing continual feedback about their work. Giving feedback takes time–so we tend to rely on testing, and usually testing after long intervals of teaching, during which students receive little help in staying on track or developing specific skill sets. But feedback (both graded and ungraded) is what powers the assessment process and keeps students progressing in their studies. Without knowing precisely what is wrong in a student’s thinking processes (and why it’s wrong), he or she can only continue to try to work harder, not better, and mostly stumble in the dark hoping to find the right path.
If you would like to comment on this article, please do so below (following the list of resources).
Resources
Fink, L. Dee. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
The Higher Education Academy, Engineering Subject Centre
Deep and Surface Approaches to Learning
www.engsc.ac.uk/er/theory/learning.asp
Middle States Commission on Higher Education
Assessing Student Learning and Institutional Effectiveness: Understanding Middle States Expectations
www.msche.org/publications/Assessment_Expectations051222081842.pdf
Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning
Speaking of Teaching
Vol. 15, No. 2- Getting more “Teaching” out of “Testing” and “Grading”
Hrabowski, Freeman A. III
Inside Higher Education, June 23, 2006
Getting the Faculty On Board
www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/23/hrabowski