Assessing Student Learning

A Common Sense Guide

Linda Suskie

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119426929
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Evaluierung & Bewertung im Bildungswesen

Assessing Student Learning is a standard reference for college faculty and administrators, and the third edition of this highly regarded book continues to offer comprehensive, practical, plainspoken guidance. The third edition adds a stronger emphasis on making assessment useful; greater attention to building a culture in which assessment is used to inform important decisions; an enhanced focus on the many settings of assessment, especially general education and co-curricula; a new emphasis on synthesizing evidence of student learning into an overall picture of an integrated learning experience;new chapters on curriculum design and assessing the hard-to-assess; more thorough information on organizing assessment processes; new frameworks for rubric design and setting standards and targets; and many new resources. Faculty, administrators, new and experienced assessment practitioners, and students in graduate courses on higher education assessment will all find this a valuable addition to their bookshelves.

Part 1
Understanding Assessment

CHAPTER 1
What Is Assessment?

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Some valuable ideas you'll find in this chapter

• Assessment is simply deciding what we want students to learn and making sure they learn it.
• Assessment is a cousin of traditional empirical research.
• Assessment today is based on research on effective teaching strategies in higher education.

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While the term assessment can be used broadly – we can assess the achievement of any goal or outcome – in this book, the term generally refers to the assessment of student learning. Many assessment practitioners have put forth definitions of student learning assessment, but the best one I've heard is in the Jargon Alert box. It's from Dr. Jane Wolfson, a professor of biological sciences at Towson University (personal communication, n.d.). It suggests that student learning assessment has three fundamental traits.

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Jargon Alert!

Assessment

Assessment is deciding what we want our students to learn and making sure they learn it.

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1. We have evidence of how well our students are achieving our key learning goals.
2. The quality of that evidence is good enough that we can use it to inform important decisions, especially regarding helping students learn.
3. We use that evidence not only to assess the achievement of individual students but also to reflect on what we are doing and, if warranted, change what we're doing.

Assessment is part of teaching and learning

Assessment is part of a four-step process of helping students learn (List 1.1). These four steps do not represent a one-and-done process but a continuous four-step cycle (Figure 1.1). In the fourth step, evidence of student learning is used to review and possibly revise approaches to the other three steps (see Jargon Alert on closing the loop), and the cycle begins anew.

Figure 1.1: Teaching, Learning, and Assessment as a Continuous Four-Step Cycle

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List 1.1 The Four-Step Teaching-Learning-Assessment Process

1. Establish clear, observable expected goals for student learning
2. Ensure that students have sufficient opportunities to achieve those goals
3. Systematically gather, analyze, and interpret evidence of how well student learning meets those goals
4. Use the resulting information to understand and improve student learning

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If the cycle in Figure 1.1 looks familiar to you, it's the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle of business quality improvement popularized by Deming (2000): Plan a process, do or carry out the process, check how well the process is working, and act on the information obtained during the Check step to decide on improvements to the process, as appropriate.

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Jargon Alert!

Closing the Loop

Closing the loop is the fourth step of the teaching-learning-assessment cycle. In the fourth step, evidence of student learning is used to understand and improve student learning by improving the other steps in the cycle: Establishing learning goals, ensuring sufficient learning opportunities, and assessing learning.

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Comparing traditional and current approaches to assessment

Faculty have been assessing student learning for centuries, often through written and oral examinations. How do today's approaches to assessment differ from traditional approaches? Table 1.1 summarizes some key differences between traditional and contemporary ways of thinking about assessment.

Table 1.1: Traditional Versus Contemporary Ways of Thinking About Assessment

Traditional Approaches: Assessment is. . .	Contemporary Approaches: Assessment is. . .
Planned and implemented without consideration of learning goals, if any even exist	Carefully aligned with learning goals: The most important things we want students to learn (Chapter 4)
Often focused on memorized knowledge	Focused on thinking and performance skills (Chapter 4)
Often poor quality, simply because faculty and staff have had few formal opportunities to learn how to design and use effective assessment strategies and tools	Developed from research and best practices on teaching and assessment methodologies (Chapters 3 and 26)
Used only to assess and grade individual students, with decisions about changes to curricula and pedagogies often based on hunches and anecdotes rather than solid evidence	Used to improve teaching, learning, and student success as well as to assign grades and otherwise assess individual students (Chapters 6 and 26)
Used only in individual course sections; not connected to anything else	Viewed as part of an integrated, collaborative learning experience (Chapter 2)
Not used to tell the story ...