Assessment Home	Office of the Provost

What is Assessment?

Definition

According to Tom Angelo (1995), assessment is “an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning.  It involves:

• Making expectations explicit and public;
• Setting appropriate criteria and high expectations for learning quality; systematically gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches those expectations and standards;
• Using the resulting information to document, explain, and improve performance.

Simply put, assessment (often called outcomes assessment) should be used to:

• Evaluate curriculum
• Plan improvements when necessary, and
• Evaluate the effects of the changes.

Assessment helps departments affirm those things in their curricula and courses that are going well.  Assessment also helps identify what is not going well, and often  points to the specific changes that might be needed.  Assessment is not static; rather,  it is an ongoing and continuous effort to improve the quality of instruction, student learning, and overall effectiveness of a department or unit. 

Uses for Assessment

Outcomes assessment has several uses.  It can be formative, summative, or both.

Outcomes assessment can be formative.  Formative evaluation data are gathered to assess the effectiveness of a program.  A formative evaluation is designed specifically to evaluate a program’s effectiveness and to influence immediate decisions about how it might be improved.  Formative data are typically reported only to those who have direct responsibility for improving and implementing a program.

Outcomes assessment may also be summative. That is, the value or worth of a new curriculum may be judged by comparing it with the curriculum it is intended to replace. In this case, data are gathered for the purposes of accountability, advancement, and decisions about continuation of the program.

Dimensions of Assessment

Outcomes assessment of student learning, the effectiveness of a department’s curriculum, and teaching effectiveness can be accomplished by measuring Benjamin Bloom’s (1960) dimensions of knowledge (cognitive learning, behavior/skills, and attitudes/values).

Measures of Cognitive Learning:  Knowledge.  These measures can be either course-specific or focused upon major or discipline, and can include:

• Knowledge – questions are designed to ask what, when, where, and who.  Knowledge of facts, definitions, terms are typical of memory items.  A typical question would be:
  
  "Define social psychology.”
  
  It is highly unlikely that this would be used as an outcome measure of student learning as questions which test knowledge typically only require rote memorization rather than actual learning.
  
  
• Comprehension - This is the lowest level of learning and understanding.  It involves students’ ability to translate information into their own words.  A typical question would be:
  
  "Explain the rhetoric of identification in your own words."
  
  
• Application – In this level students are asked to apply their knowledge to different situations and in different contexts.  Students are expected to abstract information learned and apply it to daily life.  A typical question:
  
  "Name the three stages of perception checking and explain how perception checking can improve our ability to communicate."
  
  
• Analysis – Analysis questions ask students to analyze, compare and contrast relationships between things.  For example,
  
  "How are the theories of social comparison and psychological centrality similar?  How are they different?"
  
  
• Synthesis – Here students are asked to pull together parts and elements to form a whole.  A typical question might be:
  
  "How do you explain the phrase, `You don't communicate to someone, you engage in communication with them?'"
  
  
• Evaluation – Evaluation is considered to be the highest level of student learning, as students are asked to make judgments about the value of the material presented.  A typical question would be:
  
  "Explain, in detail, why you think that the transaction model is an appropriate/inappropriate representation of the communication process."

Assessment of student learning may occur in many different ways.  Among the most common are using course tests, assigned writing projects, and asking for summative knowledge during the senior year.  The best assessments use the higher levels of learning (application – evaluation).

Behavior/Skills Outcomes.  These assessment measures are not of what students know, but what they can do.  Have they developed the higher-order cognitive skills discussed above?  Can they demonstrate knowledge-building skills such as library and computer use?  Do they have the requisite skills/behaviors for effective practice in a particular occupation or profession?  Behavior can also be assessed at two different levels by looking at currently enrolled students (i.e., do they finish their degrees in the timely fashion?  What courses are the most popular?  Least popular?  Is there a correlation between course completion and least popular classes, etc.?) and former students (i.e., occupational and salary history, further education, professional activities, contributions to community, etc.).

Attitude and Value Outcomes.  Here assessments are done to determine tolerance of diversity and recognition lf the value and contributions of other cultures, personal values, and social values (i.e., responsibility, commitment, engagement, empathy, ability to compromise, etc.).

Types of Assessment

There are many different ways to gather assessment data.  The data you gather may be:

• Descriptive – describing how things are in your program.  How well do your students write?  How many proceed to graduate school?  These data are best supported by counts (i.e., in the last 5 years, 30% of our B.A. graduates have received M.A. degrees).
  
  
• Relational -  examining the relationships between two or more factors.  For example, do graduation rates differ by gender?  Ethnicity?  Choice of option, etc.?
  
  
• Causal – deriving strong inferences about the efficacy of your program.  Have you been able to train your teaching assistants to be more effective teachers?  How?