The problem of ASSessment

This column at Inside Higher Ed elegantly summarizes the problem with assessment:

The faculty already have a language about teaching and learning. If you ask a math professor what students will learn in calculus, she may point you to the table of contents in the textbook, where dozens of topics are enumerated. If you ask how the class is going, you might hear that “they were fine with the derivative rules, but related rates problems are killing them.” This language is an integral part of teaching. 

The assessment bureaucracy -- those periodic checkboxy reports -- can only be justified if the formal learning outcome statements and their standardized assessments are superior to the native ways faculty know their students. Otherwise we could just ask faculty how the students are doing and use course registrations and grades for data. We could look at the table of contents to find the learning outcomes. 

These two worlds -- the report writing and the lived experience -- coexist, but not easily. While the assessment office depends on the informal channels of faculty knowledge to do meaningful work, in most regions of the country each program requires a formal report. These “cookie-cutter” reports fail miserably at generating new knowledge (something you couldn’t learn by just asking faculty members what they think) because they are based on faith in the special meaningfulness of the learning blurbs.

Exactly.  We already know how to talk to each other, and some of us also know how to talk to the people who hire our students.  What we don't know how to do is talk to people who need boxes checked so that they can justify their phoney baloney jobs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2oaTxPufOg