“but that they may not be valued by those to whom we are supposed to be communicating what we do and how well we’re doing it.”

This is what I’m starting to say over and over again so I’m like a broken record. I don’t think there’s any “may” about it — I think they are not valued by many of those people. And in some cases I think they’re actively resisted. But I think there’s another big group of people who matter who don’t value those things because we’re not telling them well enough why they should. I do think this partially on us.

I don’t think we should be just capitulating to what those people already think is important – we need to be ready and willing to build a case for what we think is important. This all intersects – you addressed it when you talked about public writing, and I addressed it when I talked about debate. But I see a lot of our campuses floundering without any ready to take that particular standard into this particular battle. I’d assess until the cows came home if I felt like someone would go in front of the legislature or the media or whoever and say — THIS is what WE’RE doing and THIS is why it matters.

What Geoffrey and university faculty have to struggle with is the fact that what we see as the desired outcomes of what we do may not only be hard to measure, especially in a quantitative way (and I do see quantification being held out as the gold standard in most discussions of assessment no matter what we’re told about defining our own terms or how qualitative measures are just as legitimate), but that they may not be valued by those to whom we are supposed to be communicating what we do and how well we’re doing it.

Maybe my skepticism is an artifact of how assessment is being addressed on my campus, where it’s all framed in terms of satisfying “outsiders,” whether in the immediate sense of accrediting agencies, or in the more remote sense of the Department of Education stepping in and imposing a testing regime or national standards or whatever. In the case of Slings & Arrows, “we” would be Geoffrey and the company and the “pushers of assessment” would be the board of trustees, who mostly care about turning a profit. Maybe Richard represents where we all actually have to live – trying to survive in-between imperatives, rather than living comfortably on one side or the other.

Action verbs like create, infer, transform, interpret – they can be the basis of measurable outcomes, and there’s lots of examples of assessment tools in Angelo and Cross alone to get at those outcomes on a course- or assignment- level. But student work isn’t going to be uniform or standard, and we’re going to have to trust faculty to evaluate, and we’re going to have to collaborate across campuses to make it meaningful.

So yes – I suspect the “current pushers” you’re talking about might have a problem with that. Which doesn’t mean they’re right about what is measurable or even what we should be trying to measure. I think my real answer to that question is yes, people who don’t see the value of a liberal education would have trouble with these connections – which is why we shouldn’t let them define our goals for us. Meaningful assessment isn’t about giving ourselves A’s for doing what others want – it’s about deciding what we value and figuring out ways to tell ourselves how we can help students get there better.