An electronic assessment newsletter Springfield College in Illinois
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August 2006 Vol. 7 No. 1
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Editor's Note. It now looks like it'll be a while before I can get SCI's assessment website up and running again. In the meantime, I plan to publish the newsletter by email and archive current issues on an interim basis on my personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... back issues through June 2006, as well as the teaching blog, can be accessed from my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/welcome.html
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Stuff happens, to paraphrase (but not quote) a popular bumper sticker. I had planned to put Nuts & Bolts on hiatus while I reorganized parts of SCI's assessment website, but there's information I think I should get out to faculty on a timely basis. So this email message will serve as a short version of Nuts & Bolts, SCI's monthly assessment newsletter, updating you on: (1) reminders, tips and links relating to fall semester syllabi, which are due in late July and early August; and (2) developments on the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which is deliberating radical changes in the way we do institutional assessment.
1. Syllabi
If you've taught before at SCI and/or Benedictine University at SCI, you're in luck. You don't have any changes in the syllabus format to wrestle with this year. Mary Jo Rappe of the Academic Affairs Office is sending out detailed instructions with deadlines for SCI's traditional and adult accelerated programs, as well the various Benedictine modules.
If you're new, Mary Jo's instructions will show you how to format a syllabus. And your division chair will be able to help you work with student learning objectives, learning outcomes and the other details of a college syllabus. In either event, syllabi are to be submitted this year to your division chairs for approval. With government and other outside stakeholders dictating more and more of what goes on in the classroom, our syllabi may seem more complicated than what you remember from when you were in school. But once you get the hang of it, it'll make sense. And you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.
As assessment coordinator, I will be happy to offer informal advice on how to incorporate goals, objectives and assessment criteria into your syllabi. I can be reached by email at pellertsen@sci.edu ... and we have on the SCI website a 45-page PDF document entitled "Classroom Assessment for Continuous Improvement" that walks you through SCI's Common Student Learning Objectives and other details.
Published in 2005, the classroom assessment guide summarizes some basic principles of quality improvement planning and offers tips on how to carry it out in the classroom by means of formative assessment. Unlike other parts of the assessment website at the moment, it can be reached from our homepage at www.sci.edu ... click on the Quick Link to "Faculty and Student Websites" and then on "Assessment Program Goals and Objectives" in the website directory that opens. That will take you to a new page headed "Program Goals and Objectives." Scroll down to the heading "Classroom assessment" and click on the link thqat says "Guide for Instructors (pdf)."
It's important to keep scrolling down, because on most browsers you won't be able to see the classroom assessment links at first. If your head's swimming from all these details, remember all of this stuff is like walking, breathing or riding a bicycle.
It's a lot easier to just *do* it than it is to try to explain it!
2. Federal politicking
The blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education, empaneled in September 2005 and due to issue a report in September of this year, has released a second draft report considerably less hostile to classroom educators than its first draft.
Assessment is hardly even mentioned in this draft, at least it isn't reflected in press coverage, but nationwide standardized testing is still looming in the background.
Reports the online newletter Inside Higher Ed: "Taken together, the changes made in response to commissioners’ criticisms of the initial report — many of which focused on its tendency to favor harsh-sounding and simplistic rhetoric and recommendations over practical, well-conceived analysis and answers — do not radically alter the panel’s bottom line view: that higher education must perform better in educating students and in proving its value to the American public. "And many if not most of the initial draft’s findings and recommendations remain intact, a fact many college officials will rue. The second draft, like the first, calls for the creation of a national “unit records” system to track students’ performance through their academic careers and into the work place (though it calls the proposal something else), and urges the collection and publication of significantly more information that colleges have either not collected or, more often, held close to the vest.
"But in case after case, the second draft shuns the instinct, so prevalent in the first, to “throw rocks” at higher education, as one commissioner put it in written comments to his colleagues. That doesn’t mean the new report lets colleges off the hook or ignores higher education’s real and serious problems; it just does so in language that is more descriptive and less inflamed."
Inside Higher Ed's story, dated July 17, can be accessed at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/17/commission ...
The next day Inside Higher Ed's reporter Doug Lederman, who has been following the issue all year long, did a reaction story noting that members of the commission were all over the map. He quoted David Ward, president of the American Council on Education (which represents college presidents), as saying the second draft showed "improvements in both tone and content" over the first.
But Ward added it "omitted the preamble that contained the harshest rhetoric of the first draft, and since 'these introductory comments will set the tone for the rest of the report ... I am very anxious to see what changes will be made in this area.'"
Lederman also quoted American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Ann Neal as saying the second draft dropped earlier criticism of "important curricular issues - and their connection to the serious cultural illiteracy that the commission recognizes."
And Richard Vedder, an adjunct scholar for a politically conservative think tank, worried that "as we move to maximize support within the commission [by toning down the rhetoric], we run risk of making it more of a pablum, inoffensive document that says relatively little."
Lederman's headline, "Too Much Change, or Not Enough?," catches the tone of things. His report is available at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/18/commission
Media reaction to the draft, as with the commission's other deliberations, ranged from muted to nonexistent. But there were signs the political posturing isn't quite over.
Writing on a blog titled "Phi Beta Cons: The *Right* Take on Higher Ed" in the online edition of William Buckley's National Review magazine, Candace de Russy said "this draft’s regrettable dropping of focus on declining undergraduate education should not surprise us. There are too many higher education insiders serving on the commission, and it is not in their self-interest to demand serious curricular reform and an end to grade inflation as well as to show open-mindedness to innovative means for delivering higher education."
She added, "Thus it’s the commission itself that ought to be gutted and re-constituted with members with (pardon the expression) real guts. Barring that, it is likely that this entire exercise will in the end do little or nothing to ameliorate higher education."
The permalink to de Russy's blog entry is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk5NmQ0Yjc3YjJjMzU2MWQ3NjI5MzVlN2U4OThmMzg=
Also reacting to the new draft in the National Review's higher ed blog was Charles Mitchell, program director at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. He quoted ACTA president Neal's July 18 statement to Higher Ed Today: "In a time of global competition and conflict, transparency and assessments don’t matter if the product is not worthy. ... Access and completion rates are simply irrelevant if the education received is incoherent and fails to guarantee the common ground of training and outlook on which our society depends. Yet the commission remains silent on these critical points."
Mitchell added, I think with good reason, "There is certainly much more to come on this story." Mitchell's permalink is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Nzg0ZmFiNmI3NzVlMTFkNDY3YzUzYWIyMDY0NWFlNzE= National standardized testing In the meantime, ETS has released a report calling for "a broad national system to better understand student learning in two- and four-year colleges and universities."
To do that, ETS specifically recommends "a systematic, data-driven, comprehensive approach to measuring student learning with direct, valid and reliable measures."
The ETS report is titled "A Culture of Evidence: Postsecondary Assessment and Learning Outcomes." It notes the federal commission's deliberations and recommends that the regional accrediting associations develop a national plan for testing on "four dimensions of student learning": -- workplace readiness and general skills -- domain-specific knowledge and skills -- soft skills such as teamwork, communications and creativity -- student engagement with learning.
"Colleges and universities face continued pressure to prove their effectiveness in an increasingly difficult fiscal environment," said Mari Pearlman, Senior Vice President of Higher Education at ETS, in a press release posted to the MarketWire public relations service. "We hope this paper will further the discussion about how our system of higher education might respond to this challenge."
The ETS press release, which contains a link to the report in PDF format, is available at http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=145859 ...
I hope I don't sound cynical if I note that ETS (originally known as the Educational Testing Service) is a leader in the standardized test business. Its products include the SAT, the GRE, the TOEFL and high school advanced placement tests.
-- Pete Ellertsen is chairman of SCI's assessment committee and editor of Nuts & Bolts.