Beyond Accreditation

Designing and Implementing Meaningful Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement Systems

Sunny Duerr, Jamar Pickreign, Mark LaCelle-Peterson

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781975507732
• eBook ISBN:
  9781975507756
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

In a higher education landscape that seems to be increasingly focused on accreditation and accountability, administrators, faculty, and staff in higher education institutions expend considerable resources engaging in assessment activities in response to the demands of compliance-oriented external forces. Beyond Accreditation: Designing and Implementing Meaningful Quality Assurance and Continuous Improvement Systems presents an alternative paradigm for consideration: the primary purpose of assessment systems should be to provide program improvement, with the resulting data serving as supporting evidence for compliance-oriented requests.

The book is intended to provide a foundation of background knowledge to empower programs, regardless of size or disciplinary context, to engage in the processes associated with assessment in pursuit of continuous improvement. It supplies data and other information in three distinct ways throughout the book. In some chapters, candid dialogues between the authors are presented in a conversational tone. In others, a more philosophical and sometimes historical perspective provides background knowledge informing why certain things are done and the purposes those activities serve. The remaining chapters present a practical approach to engaging in assessment, from identifying signature assessments to analyzing and reporting on data, all within the overarching context of designing an assessment system that serves continuous improvement efforts.

The accountability mindset that has taken hold in education, and in higher education in particular, has fostered a view of assessment as a complicated, challenging, and burdensome enterprise that is done to us in pursuit of compliance. Throughout the book, assessment is presented as something to be done in pursuit of continuous improvement. The authors hope that its contents prove useful to anyone in search of assistance in these efforts.

Perfect for courses such as: Educational Program Evaluation; Teacher Education; Education Policy; Teacher Education Policy; and Human Resources in Education.

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Chapter One. Author Dialogue: Culture of Assessment for Continuous Improvement
• Chapter Two. Understanding Evidence, Assessment, and Continuous Improvement
• Chapter Three. Author Dialogue: Everything and the Kitchen Sink
• Chapter Four. Understanding and Reporting Data
• Chapter Five. Author Dialogue: Data Quality
• Chapter Six. Understanding Validity
• Chapter Seven. Understanding Reliability
• Chapter Eight. Understanding Fairness
• Chapter Nine. Understanding Trustworthiness
• Chapter Ten. Author Dialogue: Signature Assessment Instruments
• Chapter Eleven. Constructing or Identifying Signature Assessment Instruments
• Chapter Twelve. Investigating Data Quality
• Chapter Thirteen. Author Dialogue: Data Management Systems vs. Assessment Systems
• Chapter Fourteen. Designing an Assessment System
• Chapter Fifteen. Author Dialogue: Data Reporting and Presentation
• Chapter Sixteen. Data Analysis, Reporting, and Visualization
• Chapter Seventeen. Author Dialogue: Decision-Making
• Chapter Eighteen. Making the Case for Continuous Improvement
• Chapter Nineteen. Meta-Assessment
• Glossary
• About the Authors
• Index