NUTS & BOLTS

An assessment newsletter serving Springfield College and Benedictine University

Of liberal arts, the Sunday Times and assessment

Most weekend mornings, I’ll admit it, learning outcomes assessment isn’t the first thing on my mind. But a couple of weeks ago, I was stuck. End of the school year coming up, courses to evaluate in a new professional curriculum and not much of an idea of how to go about it. One was a Benedictine University course, and I didn’t have Springfield College’s formally adopted Common Student Learning Objectives to guide me. So I was feeling somewhere in between cast adrift and out on my own.

Be sure to get your Classroom Assessment Technique questionnaires in to the Academic Affairs Office by the end of finals. We need the information for ongoing research that we show to outside stakeholders.

So I perked up when I was reading The New York Times, a Sunday morning ritual everywhere but without the lox, cream cheese and bagel out here in the Midwest, and I came across Times education reporter Kate Stone Lombardi’s story on Karen Lawrence, the new president of Sarah Lawrence College in New York City’s northern suburbs.    

“She is a fervent advocate for the value of a liberal arts education,” Lombardi wrote, “arguing that strong writing ability, analytical thinking and cultural literacy are critical skills for a fast-changing world.”

And there I had what I was looking for.

My course was a 300-level theory course in mass media law and ethics, and Benedictine is nothing like Sarah Lawrence, which at least by stereotype is kind of an artsy enclave for creative writers, dramatists and philosophers. The kids like to dress in black, as befits young artists, and accordingly they have adopted the black squirrels on campus as informal mascots. "Sarah Lawrence College," a T-shirt proudly proclaims, "where even the squirrels wear black" ("Featured"). But those liberal arts values are what I was trying to teach in my media law course out here on the prairies.

So here’s how I tried to reflect those values in the final – and in my chosen assessment technique, which I embed in the final – offered not because I think there’s much intrinsic interest in libel and copyright law but because it might show how one instructor works through some of these year's-end assessment issues.

Like the folks at Sarah Lawrence, I’m a strong believer in essay tests. So my 50-point essay gave students a hypothetical case (involving their analysis of a thoroughly libelous rumor that I probably had too much fun making up). I asked them to dissect the facts and the law of the case, using a system of briefing cases they will encounter if they go on to law school, and discuss what they would print and why. In other words, my stress was on writing and analytical thinking. The other essay on the final, worth 25 points, was simply an embedded assessment technique sometimes known as a self-reflective essay. Mine went:

Here’s how they work. At this writing, I haven’t graded them (the newsletter deadline comes first). But when I do, I’ll be looking for specificity and detail. Later on, after the dust from finals has settled, I’ll go back over them with a different set of criteria in mind. I’ll be especially curious to know how the case study method worked out. COMM 317 was the first time I’ve tried to use it, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the results. So I’ll be interested in whatever data I can infer about that. But my primary analytical tool is a very rudimentary content analysis: I go through the papers and jot down references to key concepts. Since I deliberately keep the questions vague so as not to suggest specific responses, I figure that gives me a measure of what topics the students thought were most important.

In addition, I asked five short-answer questions. They related primarily to what the president of Sarah Lawrence calls “cultural literacy” – if you count Illinois State Supreme Court cases and defenses against libel as literacy – and I usually think of as content knowledge.

Anyway, the story in the Sunday Times got me to thinking about the liberal arts, and the individual instruction we offer students at Springfield College and Benedictine. Liberal arts is getting to be a stylish brand. A couple of weeks ago I heard a radio ad for a regional state university touting its "small liberal arts college atmosphere" (or words to that effect – I wasn’t taking notes). And of course the liberal arts are especially central to what we've always done at schools like at Springfield College and Benedictine. Both of our mission statements emphasize liberal arts, and our heritage has long emphasized individual instruction. For 10 years now, I’ve kept a framed vision statement from the Central Province of Ursuline Sisters that reminds me "respect for the uniqueness of the individual" and "development of the whole person" are core values of education that I am expected to maintain in the classroom.

Sarah Lawrence does something like that with a system of “dons,” individual tutors like those at Oxford, and incoming college president Lawrence (who is not, incidentally, related to the family that founded the college), told the Times "with our faculty involvement with students, you’ve got a lot of independence and yet a lot of collaboration." Again, some details of Sarah Lawrence's practice are very different. But it sounds a lot like what we do best when we ground our teaching in the liberal arts.

There's no cookbook, and I'm not an expert. If readers have a different way of doing self-reflective essays, I'd love to hear about it ... and perhaps discuss in future issues of Nuts & Bolts. What I know about reflective essays I've learned mostly by trial and error. But I know educators often use them to good effect, and they can be a powerful self-assessment technique. So I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, if anyone is interested, I'm linking here to a tip sheet I sometimes give my students for a longer (self-)reflective essay. 

Formative assessment (and a plug)

On a related note, the other day natural sciences division chair Rick Rossetto gave me a copy of a newsletter for the National Science Teachers Association that includes a succinct distinction between formative and summative assessment.

Summative assessment, according to Karen Irving, co-director of the West Central Excel Center for Excellence in Science and Mathematics, occurs when "[g]roups outside the classroom such as politicians, principals, or parents … use assessment to compare student scores on one-time tests. These data can be used in auditing schools; monitoring achievement; comparing groups by age, ethnicity, and gender; appraising teachers' evaluating curricula; and exerting pressure for improvement." It comes at the end of a semester, and rightly or wrongly it’s often seen as a matter of government playing “gotcha” with educators.

Formative assessment, says Irving, is what happens when "teachers regularly conduct assessments within their classrooms and analyze them to make decisions that guide their instructional practices" (6). She adds: