|
We gather this
evening to continue our conversations on student learning assessment and to
reflect further on the assumptions we bring to assessment. We have heard this
afternoon trenchant remarks on the current state of higher education from Dr.
Lee Fritschler, formerly President of Dickinson College, and more recently
Assistant Secretary for Post-Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of
Education. We have heard, for example, that the federal impact on higher
education is likely only to increase in the coming years, that distance learning
will become more and more prominent, and that "for profit"
institutions will, with rapidly increasing aggressiveness, challenge and compete
with what is coming to be called the "traditional sector" in higher
education. Even if federally allocated money to support higher learning
increases dramatically, it will be spread more thinly across a widening range of
undertakings located under the umbrella of higher education.
While many of us associated with the
"traditional sector" might, at first, welcome the name, it ought to be
a cause of concern. In practice, the term "traditional sector," if it
comes into general use, likely will come to be contrasted with what will be
called the "innovative sector," implying that virtue lies with the
latter rather than the former. We should resist this terminology insofar as it
suggests that to be traditional is to be closed to innovation or that
traditional learning is capable of no contemporary formulation. Similarly, we
should resist the thought that "innovation" is inevitably friendly to,
good for, liberal learning. Thus it is essential that we attend to the
philosophical assumptions that support the various voices in the debate over
liberal learning.
We return to a realization we have
for some time acknowledged: classic institutions of higher learning must find
ways to evaluate better and more clearly their performance, and they must do so
in a manner that captures "the elusive spirit of intellectual
development" without killing that spirit.
Because I want to wax philosophical
as I proceed through my remarks, I will start with the practicalities of how I
came to the work of assessment and accreditation. I want to be assure you that,
if I seem headed towards the clouds, I have not altogether lost sight of the
ground. I begin by noting the coincidence that I became the Dean of Colorado
College in 1992, the year which also marks the beginning of AALE. My reflections
emerge from my experience of the past decade.
Self-Study, Assessment, and
Accreditation
I became dean of Colorado College on
July 1, 1992. The president who appointed me left for other opportunities on
that same day. Just before he left, he said, "Incidentally, the North
Central Association [NCA] now requires a mid-term report on the college in
anticipation of our next full scale accreditation visit. Ours is due no later
than June 1995, and you will no doubt have the primary responsibility for
producing it." This was the first I had heard of it. As a faculty member I
had been generally aware of previous accreditation procedures which had always
seemed very low key and even unobtrusive. I had paid little attention to the
matter and had always been assured that Colorado College had no worries
regarding accreditation. The matter was generally taken by my colleagues as part
of the background noise of the intellectual life.
What I was about to find out was
that things had changed. I was on the verge of learning about the three
"A's": Assessment, Accountability and Alverno
(1). Moreover, as I began to attend meetings with the chief
academic officers of the other thirteen colleges of the Associated Colleges of
the Midwest (ACM), I discovered that we were all facing similar issues and that
none of us had heretofore invested much time in thinking about the new demands
of the public and of governments that we give an account of ourselves. After
much discussion, fraught with antipathy for the ominous direction of assessment
and accountability in higher education, the chief academic officers of the ACM
composed a letter to the NCA, and we were joined by our counterparts in the
Great Lakes Colleges Association, twenty-five liberal arts colleges in all. In
the letter we acknowledged the need for proper assessment, we accepted that we
should be accountable for what we do, but we also expressed the expectation that
we should have the major say in developing forms of assessment appropriate to
colleges like ours. In short, we argued for collaboration and against
rationalistic uniformity. For the most part, there was a sympathetic response,
but case-by-case negotiation on appropriate methods of assessment remains a
feature of all regional accreditation today.
My own situation was complicated
further by the fact that Colorado College, well known for having adopted the
Block Plan system of instruction in 1970, was fast approaching the 25th
anniversary of the Block Plan, also in 1995. For this reason, the college had
committed to doing a major self-study of its own for presentation to the Board
of Trustees in June of that year. As of the summer of 1992, the college had
devised no plans for fulfilling either of these commitments. I was convinced,
however, that it was to our long term interest to take the lead on developing
proper methods of assessment for liberal arts colleges.
What we decided to do was to create
our own home-grown method of self-study, beginning with self-assessment of the
block plan system, with the intention of using a single self-study approach to
accomplish both tasks simultaneously. In order to do this, we created a
faculty/administrative committee to develop an approach to self-study, and we
hired, for the first time, a full-time person to do institutional research in
support of the committee. An Office of Institutional Research was created with a
full-time director working in the dean's office. This turned out to benefit us
in numerous other ways having nothing to do directly with official self-study
and assessment requirements.
The initial committee spent much
time developing a survey instrument for the whole college. When it had completed
this task, a new committee was appointed to succeed it whose task was to
implement the research, to collect and interpret the results, and to write the
final report to be presented no later than May 1995 to the trustees. All of this
was done. We were able to use the assessment of the block plan as the basis for
our mid-term report to the NCA. The latter was accepted by NCA, after some
intense discussions, and thus became the basis for the later work of the
ten-year site visit which NCA undertook in October 1997.
As all this was happening, AALE was
being founded in response to the same issues we were facing at Colorado College,
most notably accountability for student learning. Pretty quickly I began to work
with Jeff Wallin and am happy to say that I have enjoyed working with AALE for
close to a decade now, participating in three site visits and working in the
FIPSE project on core curriculum.
Liberal Learning, Reflection, and Conversation
As faculty and adminstrators of liberal arts
colleges we are associated in a common atmosphere of assessment, accountability,
and accreditation. At the same, we are participants in a world of higher
education exhibiting astonishing diversity of institutions and programs with
claims to advance liberal learning. One cannot go very far into these matters
without addressing the questions, What is liberal learning? What kind of
assessment self-study is appropriate to liberal learning? The rest of what I
have to say attempts to reflect on these questions.
First, it seems clear that assessment that is
accessible to those outside the academy is here to stay. Our external context is
characterized by increased market pressures and demand for national recognition,
and by increasing regulation and bureaucratization. Fund-raising is a
never-ending struggle in the midst of consumerism. Despite the diversity of our
academic programs, the nationalization of issues and their putative solutions
grows apace. Internally, we face the changing circumstances of the intellectual
life with its demands for research, publication and public presence. How faculty
see themselves and how they react to the question of assessment are tricky and
difficult matters.
Beset by these pressures from within and without,
it will be best if we establish methods of self-assessment and of accounting for
ourselves which are integral to, not imposed on, our daily activities of
teaching and learning. We do not need to multiply the extraneous burdens of the
academic life. In doing this, we must distinguish between mere ranking or
grading and the rich fostering of reflective conversation about what we are
trying to do and how best to do it. We require the flexible application of
helpful methods that have been practically tested.
AALE is uniquely positioned to help bring about a
radical transformation in assessment and accreditation. Among the aspects of
this are these:
-
Between an institution and its external
assessors there must be a conversation that has specificity and concreteness
as well as high regard for institutional individuality.
-
Teaching must remain central or regain its
centrality.
-
Faculties and accreditors must achieve some
common understanding of the undertaking of liberal learning, with respect
for the true character of the intellectual life.
-
What is useful in learning assessment must
not be a distraction from the life of the mind, nor an alternative to it,
nor an excessive burden.
-
Assessment should complement, and make use
of, the natural self-consciousness of thoughtful scholars.
We must acknowledge that faculties and institutions have reasons to resist
much of what is today called assessment. They must somehow protect the limited
time afforded for the life of the mind. They must cope with the pressures of
adapting to global contexts, and to constantly evolving disciplines and fields
of study. They need to feel that they are being helped in becoming more
effective teachers, that they are not being evaluated abstractly, in ways
extraneous to their daily work. They need to feel that their effort is
meaningful and not merely a mechanical response to a checklist.
We also must acknowledge that we live in an age of intense transformations
of old and customary ways: much of what we do in our institutions is
increasingly technical, analytical, rationalist, quantified, materialist,
objectified, abstract. But this is also an age of longing for transcendence
without very clear notions of what that means.
Much of the technical character of the work of learning assessment and
accreditation clearly reflects the analytic/rationalist age we have been
inhabiting for some time. Much of the controversy and uncertainty over
assessment reflects dissatisfaction with what the analytic/rationalist
approach leaves out of account. We are driven by both tradition and innovation
inevitably demanding searching and exploration, trial and error. Are we in
decline or are we feeling the pressure of new and positive possibilities? What
is authoritative for us?
Liberal learning was anciently constituted in the conviction that learning
is intrinsically good and essential to the full flourishing of the human
spirit, responsive to what was not yet found, and our awareness of being
incomplete in search of completeness. Liberal learning was pointed to rather
than simply defined. Liberal learning comes fully to sight in undergraduate
education which is the interval between school where we must learn much, the
value of which is not yet obvious, and while we still have relatively little
to say, and professional training in service to the current preoccupations of
our social life. Such learning must be both in continuity with what comes
before and after it, and also necessarily in discontinuity. If liberal
learning is successful, it fosters that disengagement - for a time - without
which true encounter with the life of the mind is much less likely to occur.
Moreover, the full benefit of this encounter is not likely to be seen all
at once or soon. There is a mystery in the relation of teacher and student.
Those who teach cannot help but know this by experience if not by careful
consideration, and, eventually, by the testimony of their former students who
see, in retrospect, what originally they only intuited or even resisted. It is
true that institutions of liberal learning are today pressed to explain
themselves, and they must do so. But they may be pardoned, I think, for
wanting to show the mystery and speak of it without explaining it away, or
translating it into a misleading and reductive array of observable behaviors.
The mysterious character of liberal learning I am referring to here is most
likely to show forth in conversation. There are, of course, documentation,
data, and statistical information that will help to establish publicly and
verifiably the character and quality of learning that takes place. Such things
help to establish a common ground that can be seen by those who want to see
it. But the reasonable need for evidence ought not be a barrier to that to
which such evidence can only point, to that which can never be fully captured
in the pointing.
It is characteristic of our peculiar age to be suspicious of transcendence
while, at the same time, sensing a profound need for it. Places of liberal
learning are intersections of both the suspicion and the desire. From my
perspective, the great debates of our generation over education - what it
should be, how to gauge its success or failure, how to justify it - are
prompted not only by a wish for certainty, but also by a wish for reassurance
that what is not entirely susceptible of certainty is, nonetheless, real.
An assessment procedure which diminishes that confidence will yield the
opposite of its goal: the goal is to understand better something we partially
understand already. The goal is not to change the object of investigation to
suit our convenience. The true success of what we are attempting requires
attention to both of these concerns. Together they point to a moment of
transformation in our self-understanding, the outcome of which - the
resolution of which - we do not yet grasp.
Institutions of liberal learning will inevitably instantiate these concerns
in acutely self-conscious ways, and thus remain a challenge and a problem for
those who would simplify, and thus obscure, the real issues and questions we
face. Resistance is built into the situation. But I believe that the
resistance is actually integral to the success of the assessment process. We
must have a dialectical relationship - both sides need to be both teacher and
learner.
Assessment and accreditation, as we now understand them, are symptomatic of
this crossroad. While we press forward we should be prepared to encounter what
is much deeper than we often think, and we should welcome that as a sign that
we are on to something of high importance, about which we must talk without
fully knowing how to talk about it. In this way, what we are doing here may
become an aspect of liberal learning rather than merely an observation of that
part of it easily seen by the naked eye from outside.
This is what I understand myself to have fallen into in 1992 even as AALE
set foot on a like path that brought us together.
1. Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is
acknowledged as one of the pioneers in student assessment, called
"ability-based education," emphasizing both knowledge and abilities.
According to Alverno, this approach "changes the way students learn and
the way teachers teach." (back to reference 1 in the
text)
Back |
