Teaching, Learning and Assessment
Thinking about assessment begins with thinking about teaching and learning. It asks faculty to reflect on some of the most basic and often unasked, let alone answered, questions: why do we teach? why do we teach what we teach? and why do we teach it the way we do? That leads to further questions: how do we engage students with what we teach? why do we ask students to do what we ask them to do? how do we know they’re learning? And then: how do we know that how we’re teaching is helping them learn?
There is assessment of student learning to determine and assign grades. And there is assessment that considers the course itself: the course content, the activities and assignments and the pedagogical approaches we use. In this context, assessment is not about grading students. It is about assessing whether the course assignments and activities and teaching and learning methods help students actually achieve the intended learning outcomes. It means finding out what works.
The beauty of thinking about assessment in this way is that it helps faculty learn what is and is not working in their course content and pedagogy toward helping students achieve your expected skills, abilities, knowledge and values and at the levels that you hope for. You might start by asking yourself: “How will I know what they learned from taking my class? And are they learning something different from what I intended … and is that valuable?” And wouldn’t it be nice to know!
Assessment provides evidence to document and validate that learning has occurred and what that learning is. Assessment also supports critically reflective teaching. Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, argues that “a critically reflective teacher is much better placed to communicate to … students (as well as to herself) the rationale behind her practice. She works from a position of informed commitment” (Brookfield, 1995, p. 17) as opposed to assuming her course activities are supporting student learning in the ways she intended.
Course evaluations assess both the course and the instructor but we know they have limited value in assessing the effectiveness of instruction and often contain bias. More meaningful assessment practices encourage instructors to reflect on what they expect students to learn through their course design, determine where it’s been effective, reflect on areas for improvement, and test out new approaches. Assessment of student learning outcomes supports teaching decisions, measures their effectiveness and supports modifications in response.
So, how do we know what students are learning?
Generally, the first step in assessing student learning outcomes is to actually write the learning outcomes. The second step is developing a well-defined rubric.