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The value of Barbara Walvoord‘s contribution to Heiland and Rosenthal’s anthology on academic assessment is spelled out in its title: “How to Construct a Simple, Sensible, Useful Departmental Assessment Process.” Before she gets on to that task, however, she clears up a few misconceptions about assessment. One is that assessment can in fact be consonant with both the values of academic departments and the requirements of external evaluators. Another is that assessment is not a tool to evaluate faculty, but rather a “systematic collection of information about student learning for the purpose of improving that learning” (336). The formula she gives is stunningly simple: set your learning goals; decide on at least one direct measure (eg, faculty evaluation of student work using detailed rubrics) and one indirect measure (eg, student surveys); and use the information to improve curricula and teaching.

What makes her article especially compelling is that she departs from that rather benign definition and pushes us to think broadly about what counts as student learning. Echoing Donna Heiland’s language, Walvoord asks, “How we might assess our most ineffable goals—qualities of mind and heart that we most want the study of literature to nurture in our students?” (336) (more…)

I intended to go over some of Heiland’s sample survey questions as examples of evaluative tools that are able to capture meaningful data in the humanities. But I think I will postpone that post until I have read a bit more on the topic. I have heard wonderful things about the assessment practices at U Mass Amherst, and I would like to read a few more articles out of Heiland and Rosenthal’s anthology before collecting Read more…

I began discussing Donna Heiland‘s views on assessment in yesterday’s post and today I wanted to take a closer look at her article, “Approaching the Ineffable: Flow, Sublimity, and Student Learning,” which is part of the volume of essays she edits, along with Laura Rosenthal, on the topic of accountability and assessment in the humanities. Heiland brings a unique perspective to the problem as a former literature professor who now works in grantmaking. She inhabits the world outside the ivory tower while very much remaining a member of the tribe, which positions her to be a wonderful interpreter for the assessment and the educator camps alike. Having been trained in literary study, she is someone who speaks our language and sympathizes with many of our concerns. During the MLA panel discussion on assessment I found myself much more drawn to her sensible, and yes, pragmatic approach to assessment than I was to those of the professor who unequivocally rejected assessment on the grounds that it was a practice that privileged the visible and representable (I am paraphrasing, but the key terms are hers). (more…)

The term assessment has been on my mind these past couple of months, in no small part due to the fact that New Yorkers have been debating how to evaluate teacher impact, the degree to which teaching can be assessed relative to student performance, and even the reliability of test scores as predictors of future success and learning. I’ve especially enjoyed the perspective brought in by the Finnish school system, which is very unlike the U.S. model in its rejection of standardized testing in preference for classroom-based tests created by individual teachers.

We’re talking the NYC public school system here, not academia, so hardly anyone is debating whether or not teachers should be evaluated and student performance should be assessed. (I’ll get to the much more ambivalent feeling on assessment within higher ed below.) And although the media like to present the matter of teacher assessment as a battle between the politicians (who blame teachers for poor student scores) and teachers’ unions (which point to larger systemic issues affecting learning), I believe most reasonable people would agree that teachers, parents, and neighborhood life all have an impact on how well children learn.

The central difficulty of assessment stems from the how: How can we manage to boil down the complex activities of teaching and learning to something quantifiable? (more…)