REINVENTING ASSESSMENT?
News flash: Federal government lauds Florida college for measuring, linking student outcomes to lifelong learning goals; innovation builds on 2,500 years of practice in education
Miami Dade College in Florida had a nice little media pop recently when faculty and students signed a “learning outcomes covenant,” as the president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Education Undersecretary Sara Martinez Tucker, among other dignitaries, looked on approvingly. What's more, the publicity threw into sharper relief some things we're doing with assessment at Springfield College and Benedictine University.“We are here because this institution wants to make sure all students that come through the door leave with the skills that will make them succeed in their professional and personal lives,” said Miami Dade President Eduardo J. Padrón, in prepared remarks that were picked up verbatim by The Miami Herald.
Martinez Tucker said Miami Dade’s outcomes covenant is an example of the kind of comparability and accountability the Education Department wants to see colleges and universities initiate everywhere. “What I’m here to do is say I applaud that you’re getting the ball rolling,” she told public affairs reporter Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Ed, the online newsletter.
“When we said comparability, it’s not that every campus has to use the same technique,” Martinez Tucker added. “It’s that consumers should be able to compare what colleges do, and they should report things in ways that students can understand. It’s going to take time [for colleges to figure out] which are right ones, and in the meantime the key is that [colleges] use measures that give them the information both to improve their offerings to students and to provide something meaningful for the American public. … That’s what Miami Dade is doing, and I applaud them.”
So what does the Learning Outcomes Compact do? Basically, it sets 10 collegewide learning outcomes, or objectives, that will, according to a college press release, “be incorporated into existing programs, courses and co-curricular activities to ensure students are truly equipped for success in today’s global marketplace.” The covenant pledges students will be able to:
1. Communicate effectively using listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.If you think you’ve heard something like that before, it’s because you have. Some of the words are different, but the skills involved here are essentially the same ones we cover in SCI’s common student learning objectives. The objectives for students at Benedictine’s Lisle campus are very similar. So are the learning outcomes or objectives at colleges nationwide.2. Use quantitative analytical skills to evaluate and process numerical data.
3. Solve problems using critical and creative thinking and scientific reasoning.
4. Formulate strategies to locate, evaluate and apply information.
5. Demonstrate knowledge of diverse cultures, including global and historical perspectives.
6. Create strategies that can be used to fulfill personal, civic and social responsibilities.
7. Demonstrate knowledge of ethical thinking and its application to issues in society.
8. Use computer and emerging technologies effectively.
9. Demonstrate an appreciation for aesthetics and creative activities.
10. Describe how natural systems function and recognize the impact of humans on the environment.
Inside Higher Ed has an online forum, and several readers noted how very familiar Miami Dade’s brand-new covenant sounded to people who are already doing assessment.
“Am I missing something?” wrote an anonymous assessment director. “Is this something new? I thought schools all over the country were doing precisely this. We certainly are …”
“I think the Department of Education should get out of Washington more often. Schoolcraft College in Michigan started these goals eight years ago,” suggested a retired administrator at Schoolcraft.
But others, including Carol Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., said Miami Dade’s media pop was a positive development.
“Many campuses are already defining goals, mapping the curriculum and co-curriculum so that the goals are intentionally addressed, and assessing student achievement over time,” Schneider said. “Miami Dade … has done us all a huge service in taking the next step — to make their important campus efforts visible to the public. Those of us in education and the media should follow their example to spread the message about the importance of liberal education outcomes wherever we can.”
Certainly by lining up an undersecretary of education for its media pop, Miami Dade accomplished that. The college, with 160,000 students, has clout. In fact, President Bush delivered this year’s commencement address there in April. And it didn’t hurt to have the metro area’s Chamber of Commerce represented at the dog-and-pony show announcing the outcomes covenant.
But I don’t think we should be cynical about it, either.
When Miami Dade's president Padrón spoke of “mak[ing] sure all students that come through the door leave with the skills that will make them succeed in their professional and personal lives,” he wasn’t just playing up to the Bush administration –- or the local Chamber of Commerce. He was speaking of one of the oldest goals of education.
I was reminded of just how old it is the other day when I found a copy of Dennis Bloodworth’s book The Chinese Looking Glass [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967] while I was shopping at the Salvation Army store on Wabash. (Don't ask.) Bloodworth was the East Asia correspondent for The London Observer in the 1960s and 1970s, and he was one of the journalists whose prose I studied when I was first getting into the newspaper business. So I paid my 50 cents and brought the book home so I could reread it. In any event, it reminded me Padrón of Miami Dade is not the first educator to think about his students’ professional and personal success. When he wrote of Confucius, Bloodworth thought of his own education back in the England of the 1930s.
“Confucius placed emphasis on moral and ethical instruction on order to fit young men for government,” Bloodworth wrote, “and any Englishman raised in the thirties must be irresistibly reminded of the hot summer form-rooms in which he took Latin as a mental discipline, the rainy and windy days on which his sports master patiently taught him the improving and intricate ritual, the inflexible etiquette of gentlemanly cricket” (30). During Confucius’ lifetime, from 551 to 479 BCE, the curriculum consisted of history, rites (which we might call theology), poetry and music instead of Latin and cricket. But Bloodworth says Confucius’ curriculum had in mind the same goals -- we might call them learning objectives: “A knowledge of Rites, [Confucius] said, regulated and disciplined the mind, and History taught the instructive events of the past. Poetry engendered ethical and improving thoughts, and Music a harmony of ideas” (29).
At SCI and Benedictine 2,500 years later we speak of content knowledge, communication and problem-solving skills, social responsibility, global perspectives, self-direction and personal growth – and at Miami Dade they have a new covenant with 10 stipulated objectives that have found merit in the eyes of today's mandarins in the U.S. Education Department. I doubt Bloodworth –- or Confucius –- would find anything very new in either set of educational goals. Somehow I find that reassuring.
-- Pete Ellertsen, chair, assessment committee
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic
newsletter published by SCI's Assessment Committee. Faculty members are: Wayne
Burrows, Brian Carrigan, Molly Finley, Dave Holland, Darlene Snyder and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Kevin Broeckling, dean of students;
Michael Bromberg, academic affairs dean, and Joanna Beth Tweedy, resource center
director, serve
ex officio. If you have information, comments or feedback,
please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor
Pete Ellertsen, in 211 Beata Hall on the SCI/Benedictine campus, 525-1420 ext.
519 or by e-mail at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by SCI's Assessment Committee. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in 211 Beata Hall on the SCI/Benedictine campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.