Assess thyself, lest ye be assessed.
That’s a line I had drafted for inclusion in the English program review. (One of my colleagues suggested we shorten that to just “Assess thyself.”) We requested funding to bring an assessment expert to campus, to hold a workshop for the English faculty.
Inside Higher Ed has an article on the resistance to assessment often found withing the humanities disciplines.
- Any effort to try to measure learning in the humanities through
what McCullough-Lovell deemed “[Margaret] Spellings-type assessment” —
defined as tests or other types of measures that could be easily
compared across colleges and neatly sum up many of the learning
outcomes one would seek in humanities students — was doomed to fail,
and should.- It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach
broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek
to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might
be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well
students have mastered those outcomes.- It is incumbent on humanities professors and academics generally to
decide for themselves how to assess whether their students are
learning, less to satisfy external calls for accountability than
because it is the right thing for academics, as professionals who care
about their students, to do.“It’s in our hands — nobody is forcing us into overly prescriptive
models or any one particular way at this point, and it’s our
responsibility to respond to the public’s interest [in learning what
value they’re getting for their tuition and tax dollars] by doing it
ourselves,” said Grossman. “But the longer it’s delayed,” he warned,
“the more over time the public will start saying, ‘What is really going
on?’ and start pushing for the kinds of measures that nobody really
wants.” — Doug Lederman
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Thank you for the link to this article. It matches my present sentiments (which may be changing). Lederman and Scobey really captured it well with this passage:
"Ultimately, 'The question ‘How well are we doing educating our students in the humanities?’ is much closer to ‘How good is our marriage?’ than it is to ‘How good is this hotel’s service?’' he said. In other words, it tends more toward the subjective than the objective, is better assessed over the long term than in snapshots, and is difficult to compare, among other things. The question probably can be answered, but with 'thick description' rather than concise data, Scobey said."
To my mind, assessment needs to be a system that fosters reflective practice in faculty, where criteria for evaluation emerges from those faculty rather than is imposed from an external source. I actually welcome help -- if not pressure -- from adminstrators who understand that and are trying to foster it.