Meaningful program assessment requires faculty participation. The challenge of getting faculty involved and staying involved lies in convincing them that the benefits of assessment are worth any additional work it generates.

One way to start the discussion about assessment is to initially work with department chairs, preferably when they are not too busy. To get departments on board, Oberlin College conducts assessment workshops between terms. In its first assessment workshop in January 2005, department chairs met with assessment experts, who had them identify their goals and start to think about how they could best measure progress toward those goals in ways that would be directly observable. The goal of that first workshop was for each chair to develop a single indirect measure of learning outcomes—something that asks students about their impressions of the learning experience. “You’re not asking for evidence; you’re asking someone to provide a subjective report on what they think they’ve learned,” says Patty deWinstanley, associate dean of Oberlin’s College of Arts and Sciences.These indirect, subjective measures often ask questions related to writing, public speaking, quantitative skills, and critical thinking, and can include student surveys conducted at various times throughout the program. Oberlin currently has in place a freshman survey, and deWinstanley expects all departments to have a senior survey in place soon.

In the next workshop during the summer, the department chairs worked on developing direct measures of learning outcomes. DeWinstanley has made an effort to make the departments feel validated in what they are already doing, not try to get them to go after something completely new and different. They can use grades, but they can’t simply use grades in and of themselves because grades do not allow for a direct measure of student learning.

“We work with them to determine a rubric for their department and to align those rubrics with their department-level goals so that they then have a piece of paper that can help someone, for example, take a look at an exam and see which questions are trying to tap into the department’s goals and then also to see what the faculty members had in mind as they went through and graded that question,” deWinstanley says. “In that way we could build on what the department is already doing. If they’re doing exams and they want to report back with their exams as an indicator of student learning, they can. If it’s a senior project or thesis, they could do that. If it’s a portfolio that students put together, they could do that. We’ve sat down with each department and said, ‘What do you already do? What are some of the products of your students’ learning that you’re already collecting?’ And then we formalized it.”

Formalization means keeping some of the papers, exams or other products of learning and using rubrics to score them to show what the students learned. “The rubrics are a way that you can express the goal in a fashion that allows you to observe the actual behaviors. What are you actually looking for when you’re grading? Grades are OK, but they’re just not enough. You have to pair with those grades this kind of expression of what it means to have received an A, B, or C in a course,” deWinstanley says.

Faculty participation in assessment is needed because faculty have content expertise and need to choose assessment techniques to match content-specific learning objectives. “Each department has a different way of doing things. That’s the real strength of this. We allow this to be very much driven by the department. First of all they are very much the experts at looking at student learning in their fields. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to look at student learning in the history department because my training is in psychology,” deWinstanley says.

There is great variety in the direct measures of student learning at Oberlin, including standardized tests, alignment of certain sections of the GRE with department-level goals, student profiles, senior theses, and seminar papers.

In order for assessment to be useful, it must measure learning outcomes over time. This is why deWinstanley and her colleagues are working with departments to make these activities sustainable. “We want assessment to be a regular part of the department’s activities and reports that already exist, and we hopefully have gotten across that it’s not any one individual in the department that takes this on; rather, this is shared across the department,” deWinstanley says.

As departments discover the benefits of ongoing assessment, deWinstanley invites faculty from those departments to speak to other departments about those advantages.

If that doesn’t convince departments to get involved in assessment, deWinstanley reminds faculty that the assessment committee also conducts program reviews, which affects how resources get allocated. “A department that decides not to do any assessment at all will actually be in a very bad situation when program review time rolls around, because they will not have the kind of information that other departments have to show why they need an addition to staff or why they need an increase in their budgets,” deWinstanley says.

Ongoing workshops will give faculty the opportunity to talk about their progress and remind them that “we always have to be thinking about assessment at the department level,” deWinstanley says.

“Busy faculty have to make decisions all the time about what they can and can’t do, and unless they feel like assessment is valued by the institution, I think that that’s really a problem for sustainability. By providing feedback to the departments, we not only help them to further develop their instruments and learn more about the questions they may have, but we also show them that the institution values the work they’ve done,” deWinstanley says. 

Contact Patty deWinstanley at Patty.deWinstanley@oberlin.edu.

The above article first appeared in Academic Leader, a monthly newsletter that helps deans, chairs, and other academic decision-makers provide effective leadership within their colleges or departments and fulfill their institutions' primary missions of teaching and scholarship. Click here for more information and to subscribe.