Leadership of Higher Education Assessment

A Guide to Theory for Practitioners

Matthew B. Fuller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815396758
• eBook ISBN: 9781351180986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leadership of Higher Education Assessment provides a comprehensive treatment of leadership theories and helps practitioners integrate this knowledge into their assessment work. Synthesizing leadership theories into manageable concepts relevant to the college and university context, this useful guide supports assessment leaders in addressing complex institutional situations and developing their own unique philosophy of assessment and leadership style. In the face of ongoing challenges such as data accessibility, data security concerns, a shifting accreditation environment, complex politics, and lack of available resources, this book is a critical guide for assessment leaders who want to take command of their practice.

Chapter 1

Assessment Leadership

Its Contexts and Challenges

Chris is in his last year of Higher Education Administration master’s graduate preparation. In his program he has been introduced to a variety of professors. He has developed rapport with Dr. Carpenter who has encouraged Chris to pursue a doctoral degree and who has also sparked a desire for inquiry in Chris. His master’s program includes coursework in assessment, taught by Dr. Carpenter for the last 17 years. Still, Chris recalls thinking after the first day of class, he was taking a master class from a professor who truly cared about assessment and student learning and was doing something to ensure his craft of teaching was of the highest quality. It is clear to Chris that Dr. Carpenter is a faculty member who uses assessment to help students learn through his teaching.

Because of his experience in Dr. Carpenter’s assessment class, and through conversations he had with many faculty, Chris has begun looking at a career in assessment. He believes he has the expertise in research methods and is able to produce reports and manage data files. He thinks to himself, “That is what an assessment person does, right?” So, Chris begins to search job postings for assessment positions across the nation. One job in particular piques Chris’ interest. It is an Assistant Registrar position at Mt. Holy Hill College. The job posting reads:

The Assistant Registrar for Assessment manages and evaluates faculty, directors, department chairs, faculty, staff, and students in compliance with appropriate policies and procedures. Provides vision and leadership for a diverse, dynamic, innovative, and passionate community of faculty, staff and students. Provides year-round leadership, management, participation and development of an instructional, student, and/or support services division’s day, evening, weekend, inter-session and summer training programs on assessment. Collects, analyzes, and reports data related to campus operations, instruction, course assignments and offerings, and other data. Organizes and manages the operation of the Registrar Office’s accountability team. With faculty, staff, and other administrators, manages the preparation of the class schedules, catalogs, brochures and other printed or electronic materials for the assigned division(s). Provides leadership for and assists with departmental program reviews, accreditation process, and all matters related to assessment. Stays abreast with national and institutional developments in accreditation and assessment. Carries out complex projects and special programs and ensures faculty and staff are trained to also engage in complex projects and special programs. Completes other duties as assigned.

As this job suits his new interests, Chris decides to apply. He is pleasantly surprised when he is asked to interview for the position. A few weeks later, he is called by the registrar herself who offers Chris the job. After a few negotiations, the contract is signed and Chris is a new leader of higher education assessment. The night before he begins his new job, his family and friends invite him to a celebratory dinner honoring his new beginning. As he drives home that evening, a thought flashes through his mind: “What does it mean to be an assessment leader?” After pondering this question for a while, he quickly realizes that even the amazing Dr. Carpenter had not taught him much about that topic. As he drives on, he thinks about the challenges and opportunities his new job will afford. In essence, he is reflecting on his philosophy of assessment and he resolves to write down some of his thoughts in a philosophy of assessment statement.

Leadership of higher education assessment is quantitatively and qualitatively different from leadership in other areas of academe. Wrapped up in one succinct role, you will find individuals who must ensure that all of the unique bureaucratic intricacies of existing as a unit at a college or university are dutifully carried out. These same individuals are also attendees at countless meetings with individuals high in the institutional hierarchy as well as those “in the trenches” who are reporting to them on a variety of institutional processes of concern. They serve as a vital conduit in which information flows around the institution. Like Chris, they must stay abreast of all of the shifts occurring inside and outside of higher education. In areas such as accreditation, financial aid, law, or diversity for example, the dizzying amount of mandates and pronouncements from various boards and agencies is enough for any person to track. In addition to all of these and many more responsibilities, these unique leaders must lead a variety of units, each of whom has their own disciplinary bent on how higher education should occur. They must work with faculty and staff in a process that is widely accepted as beneficial to students and institutions but that still has a fair number of vehement detractors. They operate on a stilt-like foundation of theory that maintains that if one collects information on how well students are learning, faculty and staff will naturally want to improve and make that learning all the better.

Their skill sets and training must include a background so diverse, to find all of these skills in one person is next to impossible. They must be expertly skilled in educational research methods, to the point that they must know higher order quantitative statistical analyses, strong qualitative data collection and analysis methods, and mixed methods approaches. Furthermore, they must also know preference patterns for these methodological approaches across a variety of disciplines, even individual faculty and administrators. They have to be able to report complex data in succinct specific ways to meet the needs of the president and the legislature, as well as student groups and others on campus. In addition to prowess in these skills, the leaders must feel comfortable in front of a group of experts in their fields, individuals who live their lives in a sea of criticism. In so doing, they must be able to appeal to the biologist who has rigorous expectations that inquiry involves the scientific method as well as the sociologist who sees knowledge as information transmitted between cultures and individuals. These leaders must also operate an office, navigate the political environment of academe, budget for operations appropriately, supervise, hire, and evaluate staff, and ensure that laws and policies—often themselves misunderstood as moving targets—are being adhered to.

All of this must be done in a career area that has taken a bit of a beating lately. Several opinion articles (Gilbert, 2015; 2018; Worthen, 2018) have bemoaned assessment as a complex, fruitless process leading to little of value or a behemoth of an administrative process that distracts from the core mission of teaching and learning. Others have criticized specific assessment efforts and argued the need for updated, recent instruments (Bennett & Brady, 2012; Olivas, 2011; Porter, 2011). Some have gone as far to argue that assessment is an extension of commercialization or neoliberalism in higher education (Raaper, 2016). My research has focused on bringing an empirical foundation to major philosophical questions about assessment. Most of my career as been spent empirically examining student, faculty, administrators, student affairs staff members’ perceptions of cultures of assessment. Across many years of data collection a clear trend has emerged: Faculty resist engaging in assessment. Two out of every five participants in the Faculty Survey of Assessment Culture (since 2005) have indicated they resist doing assessment. Further exploring open ended data from the survey reveals why. Assessment is viewed with a healthy amount of skepticism, a ruse aimed at justifying administrators’ salaries (Holzweiss, Bustamante, & Fuller, 2016). Yet, these same faculty from more than a decade’s worth of research also hold that “assessment is a ‘good thing’ for my institution to do” (87.8%, n = 2,814) and “without assessment, their institution would suffer” (76.3%, n = 1,084) (See Fuller & Bearden, 2018). In a time when assessment is widely ridiculed, how is it that it can also be viewed as something so beneficial?

ASSESSMENT LEADERSHIP IS UNIQUE, BUT THERE ARE SIMILARITIES TO OTHER AREAS OF LEADERSHIP

Assessment leaders, in the course of their day, must work with faculty and staff who might simultaneously think they are the primary means of improving higher education and the primary means of destroying it. To say that assessment leadership is unique from leadership in other areas of academe is an understatement. That is not to say that assessment leadership is harder than say, leadership a department chair or an academic adviser would demonstrate, or the faculty and staff member who may have happened to pick up this book off of the resale bookstore shelf should feel pity for the assessment leader who may have once owned it. Leadership in all facets of modern academe is difficult. To position leadership in one area of academe as more difficult than another only perpetuates a long-standing problem in academe; fracturing. If leaders come to believe that they are subjected to the most difficult leadership scenarios and that other leaders on campus could not possibly understand what it is they are going through, a form of leader isolation takes root. If, instead, leaders realize that the pursuit of the various purposes of academe’s multitude of missions necessitates specialized leadership skills in order for each to accomplish the aims of their unit—without reference to false dichotomies of harder versus easier—a more collaborative network of support is possible.

The Need for Interdisciplinary Assessment Leadership Preparation

If we opt to view assessment leadership not as harder but as different from leadership in other areas of the institution, it is reasonable to assume that that the majority of assessment leaders are not prepared or trained in leadership. Leadership preparation is rare for many academics (Schwarzbach, 2016). Those students fortunate enough to engage in graduate work with leadership components in the curriculum are introduced to a wide array of leadership theories, but there is only so much that can be done in the course of a semester or in a traditional class setting. Indeed, most leadership skills are learned “on the job” and through “trial and error,” leading to yet another systemic problem. At precisely the moment when many in higher education bemoan growing complexity in higher education, many arms of the modern multi-versity lack a synthetic repository of leadership theories from which to guide their leadership and operations. Without a clear, widely understood foundation for leadership in higher education many are left to “make it up as they go” often drawing the ire of many of their colleagues.

The lack of leadership preparation for assessment leaders is challenging, though not insurmountable. Using an interdisciplinary approach aids considerably in responding to the unique challenges in assessment leadership. Doing so allows assessment leaders to draw on the strengths of many perspectives to adapt leadership styles to meet a diverse set of needs. It also allows them to leverage the strengths of their preferred disciplinary foundations, augmented by leadership theories drawn from many other foundations that resonate with others on campus. A strong grounding in leadership theory is, perhaps, the only way to respond to the complex challenges facing higher education in the coming decades.

THE EMERGENCE OF ASSESSMENT IN CURRENT HIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXTS

Why is it so difficult to effectively lead modern institutions of higher education? Well, in short, today’s colleges and universities must do so much. Modern colleges and universities must carry out functions that generations of previous academic leaders would have never thought would be under the purview of colleges and universities. A brief historical foray is illustrative of how complex colleges and universities have become compared to how they were prior to the advancement of more complex, bureaucratic, and accredited institutions.

The Root of Standards and Their Assessment

In 1852, the University of Pennsylvania set standards for admission and the curriculum that were representative of many colleges of the day. To be admitted as a freshman, students had to be at least 14 years of age and to have passed entrance examinations in Latin, Greek, ancient and modern geography, English grammar, arithmetic, and elementary algebra. Most examinations were conducted orally. Well-prepared students could be admitted as sophomores, or even as juniors, an early form of advanced placement. Once admitted, students’ academic experiences consisted primarily of a curriculum in classical languages, literature, moral philosophy, religion, ancient and modern history, algebra, geometry, and calculus. Instruction in modern or particular foreign languages were available for an extra fee as were specialized courses in then-contemporary subjects such as constitutional law, mechanics, chemistry, optics, electricity, and magnetism, though these additional courses were rare. Students attended lectures by professors for three terms each year, a trimester system. In addition, the bulk of students’ academic experiences included three hour-long recitations every day of the week as learning was characterized as student competence being demonstrated by memorizing and repeating of facts. Recitations were so important they often extended to Saturdays and well into the evening. At the conclusion of each term, faculty tested students through oral and written exams and recitations (Geiger, 2016). Assessment, therefore, was easily administered by the professor who could quickly confirm accuracy of what was recited.

Classrooms were sparse and devoid of technology, even by 1850s standards. Books, a hot commodity of the day, were often only available to the well-to-do students who enjoyed an edge in the recitation-based system of assessment, a pattern noticed even today (Crosnoe & Muller, 2014). Libraries were cobbled together through acquisitions from philanthropists and benefactors who left their collections to the university. Rudimentary housing and dining facilities and services were available for a modest fee (University of Pennsylvania, 2016). There are many accounts (Cohen & Kisker, 2009; Geiger, 2016; Lucas, 2006; Thelin, 2011) suggesting the University of Pennsylvania experience was the norm, not the exception.

In this vignette, we see a university operating by today’s standards as somewhat of a stripped down model. Institutions of yesteryear lacked advising centers, counseling services, police forces, financial aid offices, let alone distance education support services, or modern resemblances of distance education, for that matter. This says nothing about many modern discourses to which assessment practitioners are privy, such as fundraising efforts, governmental relations, media interactions, and accountability. There was no specialized set of administrators recruiting students or supporting them as they filled out admissions paperwork. In fact, students in the 1850s seldom filled out extensive admissions paperwork at all, greatly reducing the need for administrative burden (Thelin, 2011). Instead, families would often leave their sons—it was seldom their daughters until much later in American history—at the doorsteps of the university president’s house and expect them to return home years later obviously more learned and refined. Perhaps an official roll of paying students was completed, but the extensive admissions and financial aid files of today were inconceivable. Few institutions even had any financial aid to offer students and federally backed loan systems were more than a century away (Fuller, 2014). Recreational, extracurricular, or social activities were not offered through large centers but u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author Biography
• 1 Assessment Leadership: Its Contexts and Challenges
• 2 Theories of Information Behavior: How Individuals Decide to Process and Use Information
• 3 Trait and Behavioral Leadership Theories
• 4 Assessment and Contingency Leadership Theories
• 5 Transformational and Change Leadership Theories in Higher Education Assessment
• 6 Assessment and Constructivist Leadership Theories
• 7 Emerging Leadership Theories: Assessment as Complexity and Chaos
• 8 Leading Assessment for Cultural Transformation
• Index