9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning
- The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment
is not an end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective
practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most
value for students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values should drive
not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so. Where questions about educational
mission and values are skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring
what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really care about.
- Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning
as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning
is a complex process. It entails not only what students know but what they can
do with what they know; it involves not only knowledge and abilities but values,
attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success and performance
beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these understandings by employing
a diverse array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using
them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of integration.
Such an approach aims for a more complete and accurate picture of learning, and
therefore firmer bases for improving our students' educational experience.
- Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear,
explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented process. It
entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations
-- those derived from the institution's mission, from faculty intentions in program
and course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals. Where program purposes
lack specificity or agreement, assessment as a process pushes a campus toward clarity
about where to aim and what standards to apply; assessment also prompts attention
to where and how program goals will be taught and learned. Clear, shared, implementable
goals are the cornerstone for assessment that is focused and useful.
- Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences
that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes is of high importance;
where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we
need to know about student experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching,
and kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help
us understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such knowledge
comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.
- Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Assessment
is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot" assessment
can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked
series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of
individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same examples
of student performance or using the same instrument semester after semester. The
point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continous improvement.
Along the way, the assessment process itself should be evaluated and refined in light
of emerging insights.
- Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the
educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide
responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that responsibility. Thus,
while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over time is to involve people
from across the educational community. Faculty play an especially important role,
but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without participation by student-affairs
educators, librarians, administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve
individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees, employers) whose experience
can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for learning. Thus understood,
assessment is not a task for small groups of experts but a collaborative activity;
its aim is wider, better-informed attention to student learning by all parties
with a stake in its improvement.
- Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates
questions that people really care about. Assessment recognizes the value
of information in the process of improvement. But to be useful, information must
be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. This implies
assessment approaches that produce evidence that relevant parties will find credible,
suggestive, and applicable to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking
in advance about how the information will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment
is not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts
with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and
interpreting of data, and that informs and helps guide continous improvement.
- Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger
set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little.
Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning
is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational
performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality
of undergraduate education is central to the institution's planning, budgeting,
and personnel decisions. On such campuses, information about learning outcomes
is seen as an integral part of decision making, and avidly sought.
- Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to
the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As educators,
we have a responsibility to the publics that support or depend on us to provide
information about the ways in which our students meet goals and expectations. But
that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our deeper obligation
-- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators
are accountable have a corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement.
Authors: Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine
El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M. McClenney; Marcia
Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran; Barbara D. Wright
This document was developed under the auspices of the AAHE Assessment Forum with support
from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education with additional support
for publication and dissemination from the Exxon Education Foundation. Copies may be
made without restriction.
