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Peggy L. Maki, Ph.D., is an Education Consultant and Assessment Field Editor, Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Assessment is a process of systematic inquiry about how well students learn and develop knowledge, understanding, abilities, behaviors, attitudes, ways of knowing, thinking, and problem solving that an institution and its programs and services assert they teach and develop. Driven by intellectual curiosity about how well students apply, use, transfer, draw upon, synthesize, and question what they learn both inside and outside of the classroom, this process involves an interdependent relationship among students and educators across an institution itself. This interdependent relationship is anchored in examining evidence of student learning and self-reflecting on that evidence. When interpretations of assessment results and reflection on those results indicate that students or cohorts of students are not achieving desired levels of learning, higher education institutions have the opportunity to redesign or rethink their educational practices to advance or improve students' learning.
Much like photographers who focus and position their cameras to capture the perspective they wish to represent, colleges and universities also can focus and position students and educators to learn about and reflect on student learning through assessment. I propose two interrelated positions of inquiry that situate students and educators to learn about student learning within the context of an institution's culture, values, and educational practices:
- Students positioned to chronicle their learning by charting their learning and development along the continuum of their studies and providing evidence of and reflection on how well they progressively construct meaning and integrate learning across their undergraduate programs of study;
- Educators positioned to examine how well pedagogy, curricular and instructional design, educational experiences, such as internships, and use of educational tools, such as technology, promote student learning.
Students Positioned to Chronicle Their Learning
More than a process of ingesting information, learning is a multi-dimensional process of making meaning over time through various ways of learning-from memorizing formulas, concepts, and principles to applying that knowledge to solve representative disciplinary or professional problems. How students learn is, indeed, complex. Some students, for example, may need to ground their new learning visually, such as through representations of concepts or principles. Other students may need to ground their new learning by interacting with peers. How students learn differs from human being to human being and may even differ within each of us depending on the nature of the task we face. What is easy for one person to learn may be difficult for another person to learn.
Given the complex ways in which humans learn, assessment becomes, then, an opportunity for us to position students to continue to chronicle their learning across their undergraduate and graduate studies. Through this chronicle, students learn about and reflect on how well they transfer, apply, and integrate learning along the continuum of their studies, not solely at the end of single courses. That is, they track how well they construct meaning based on multiple and varied opportunities to learn. This chronological tracking, in turn, enables them to see and explore their emerging learning against sets of educational experiences they encounter, thereby deepening the relevance of their repertoire of knowledge, abilities, habits of mind, ways of knowing and understanding, strategies, perspectives, and accumulated experiences.
The following strategies position students to become chroniclers of their own learning:
- Distributing learning outcome statements to students when they matriculate into our institutions and declare their major career. These statements describe what we expect students to demonstrate by the time they graduate. Statements such as, "Students will apply mathematical reasoning to real world problems," orient students to our shared institution- as well as program-level expectations for learning. More importantly, they position students to take responsibility for their learning over time.
- Providing curricular-co-curricular maps that visually represent what students' learning journey will look like. These maps chart courses and educational opportunities against learning outcome statements to illustrate the multiple and diverse opportunities students will experience to develop institution- and program-level learning outcomes. These maps also position students to take responsibility for their learning as a process of integration and application, not as a checklist of courses and educational opportunities. They also position students to make choices about courses and educational experiences that will contribute to their learning and improve areas of weakness.
- Inviting upper level students to share their work with new students during new students' orientation to the institution. Upper level student work demonstrates both students' achievement and their struggles to master concepts, principles, or abilities. In addition, using peers to orient new students provides new students with a realistic sense of what lies before them and the kinds of effort they will need to exert.
- Providing students with learning style inventories that enable them to identify how they learn so that they stretch their repertoire of learning styles over time. (For examples of learning styles inventories, search on the web using the following keywords: learning styles inventories, learning styles, pedagogy).
- Identifying a schedule of times and methods along the continuum of students' studies to assess students' progress towards learning outcomes and their eventual level of mastery. For example, embedding problems or case studies into a non-quantitatively focused course to determine how well students are able to reason quantitatively is one example. Developing increasingly more complex problems across a program of study and asking students to respond to these after a certain sequence of courses is another example. Requiring students to maintain a portfolio of their work that reflects their achievement against your institutions' standards and criteria of judgment is yet another example of a way to capture and track students' learning over time.
- Integrating opportunities for students to reflect on what and how well they are learning in relationship to educational practices across the institution. For example, as a result of courses they take and other opportunities they participate in, such as projects in the community, ask students to reflect on how well they have learned and are able to apply that learning to new learning contexts. These opportunities to reflect may become part of student portfolios, for example. Or they may occur in a focus group established to question students' perceptions of their learning. Descriptions of their own inabilities to move from memorization of information to transfer of that learning to solve a disciplinary problem might well emerge from self-reflective writings or focus group meetings.
These approaches position students to take responsibility for their learning over time and to take responsibility for demonstrating their learning within the context of institution- and program-level stated expectations for their achievement.
Educators Positioned to Explore Their Educational Practices
Because students learn differently and over time, assessment becomes the means for educators to discover how well students learn based on the design of their intentions translated into pedagogy, curricular and instructional design, use of educational tools, and sets of educational opportunities. Educators include faculty, administrators, representatives from student affairs, student services, support or tutoring services, library and information resources, teaching assistants, internship advisors, and those in the local community who provide learning opportunities for our students. They offer a range of educational opportunities that extend from within a classroom to outside of the classroom, such as in internships, community service projects, self-paced learning modules, or peer-to-peer study groups. Evidence of student learning enables them to question how well their practices promote, perhaps even hinder, students' abilities to understand, perform, apply, integrate, and transfer learning over time. Evidence if student learning demonstrates how well students progressively construct meaning and integrate learning across courses and experiences. Assessment results derived along the continuum of students' studies provide educators with ongoing opportunities to intervene, redirect, and improve students' learning based upon what they learn about students' achievement levels.
This chronological inquiry may also become a collaborative relationship between educators and students actively involved in identifying how well students are achieving levels of performance, as well as facing obstacles that thwart their achievement. That is, assessment along the continuum of students' learning captures the multi-dimensional ways in which humans learn, understand, make meaning, and represent themselves, as well as locates challenges that hinder progress. In this position of inquiry, educators thread assessment methods across students' undergraduate and graduate studies to learn about the efficacy of educational practices in relation to desired levels of student achievement. Based on assessment results, they then can reflect on the effectiveness of their practices that may lead to changed practices.
Thus, for example, collecting students' work at designated points in their studies--upon their matriculation into the institution or their acceptance into a program; at mid-point in their studies; and at the end of their studies-- provides chronological evidence of how well students progress in their learning against educational practices. Supposing an institution wanted to ascertain how well students continue to reason quantitatively after they had taken their mathematics courses. Incorporating a problem for them to solve in a non-quantitative course they take semesters later could provide evidence of students' sustained ability to apply quantitative reasoning.
There are two approaches that educators can take to position themselves to learn about students' ability to transfer, apply, integrate, and synthesize learning:
- Identify points along the continuum of undergraduate students' studies to assess their work in relation to the intentional design of pedagogy; curricula, co-curricula and instruction; or other educational practices, such as the use of multi-media, to determine the effectiveness of these approaches in teaching and learning. This approach profiles student learning to chronicle how well students progressively construct meaning across courses and other educational experiences. Assessment results derived along the continuum of students' studies provide continuous opportunities to intervene, redirect, and improve their learning.
- Ask students to identify how and what they are learning at designated points in their studies, for example, at the end of a course, or after they have completed a sequence of courses and educational experiences. Metacognition, thinking about one's thinking, is a defining practice of experts (National Research Council, 2001, 78-79). Engaging students in self-reflection provides them with an opportunity to slow down their thinking to identify what they do and do not understand in order for them to progress. Without this kind of experience students often view education as an accumulation of courses, credits, grades, or scores, rather than viewing education as a process of building upon, advancing, and connecting one's learning.
This chronological inquiry may also become collaborative: both educators and students become actively involved in assessing for learning to identify not only how well students are achieving, but also to identify patterns of weakness in students' level of achievement. An ongoing review of student work from course to course in a major, for example, provides students with multiple opportunities to represent their learning, receive feedback about it, and reflect on their level of accomplishment. Practiced in the arts, continuous review of student work, based on public and shared criteria, promotes integration of learning and students' self-reflection about their achievement. This review also enables faculty to identify patterns of student weaknesses. In turn, these findings become the focus of routine program-level dialogue during which colleagues determine ways to implement changes to address those patterns in sequences of courses, pedagogy or other educational practices. This approach also positions students to inquire into their own learning. And it positions those within the institution to view student learning against the educational practices of the institution across its programs and services.
By positioning students to chronicle their own learning, they become responsible for their progress and mastery. By positioning educators to explore their practices along the continuum of students learning, they gain knowledge about how well their practices promote students' ability to transfer, apply, synthesize, and integrate learning. Viewing assessment as a process of inquiry that advances faculty and student learning creates a partnership between students and the larger educational community. Anchored in the programs, services, and array of educational opportunities institutions offer, assessment functions as a lens through which students and educators learn about themselves. Specifically, they learn about the degree of congruence or "fit" between programmatic and institutional expectations for student learning and students' actual achievement.
Given that learning is a complex process, that students learn as a result of different pedagogies, that they face different obstacles based on misunderstanding or long held beliefs, and that they reach moments of understanding at different points along their studies, assessment becomes a process of discovering how and when students learn over the life of their educational careers. Learning gained from interpreting assessment results enhances institutional knowledge, thereby positioning, the "institution itself as a learner-over time, it continuously learns how to produce more learning with each graduating class, each entering student" (Barr and Tagg, 1995, p. 14).
Portions of this article are from Peggy Maki's recent book: (2004). Assessing for Learning: Building an Institutional Commitment across the Institution. Stylus Publishing, LLC, and the American Association for Higher Education.
References
Barr, R.B., and Tagg, J. (1995, November-December). From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change, 27, 14.
National Research Council. (2001). Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 78-79.
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