SAMPLE PROBLEM STATEMENT:

The inherent value of student outcomes assessment seems to be widely

recognized after nearly 20 years of work to promote it. Few committed educators and
administrators deny that understanding what and how students are learning on an ongoing
basis can strengthen the teaching and learning mission of any higher education
institution. While critique of assessment is forthcoming to fulfill a real need to
understand what this reform means in education (Hargreaves, Earl, & Schmidt, 2002;
Slevin, 2001; Spademan, 1999), assessment pressures have not abated. Calls for
accountability from outside the academy add to a sense of urgency for proponents who
see assessment as having great potential to improve the productivity and quality of higher
education at a time of increasing competition, waning public support, and retrenchment
(Ewell, 2001; Zemsky & Massy, 1995).
One oft-stated goal of the assessment movement is for the higher education
community to use assessment processes to articulate clearly the nature and value of
conferred degrees in terms of the knowledge, abilities, and dispositions of graduates
(Astin, 1991; Boyer, 1990; Holyer, 1998; Terenzini, 1986). Ideally, institutions gather
and use evidence of student learning and that which promotes or prevents it to shape
institutional missions and planning and to guide critical choices about curriculum and
instruction (AAHE, 1992; Palomba & Banta, 1999.) This is a tall order, but one that
higher education has not avoided as institutions of all kinds have implemented
assessment (Banta & Associates, 1996; El-Khawas, 1995).
Despite widespread adoption, assessment has not lived up to its promise to
provide means for accountability and improvement (Angelo, 2000; Gelmon, 1997;
Peterson & Augustine, 2000; Ratcliff & Associates, 1995; Tucker, 1999). Angelo notes a
“shared sense among critics and adepts alike that our assessment efforts are not making
enough of a difference, or the right kinds of differences” (2000, p.1). There is empirical
evidence to validate this “shared sense” that the assessment movement is not fulfilling its
promise to make institutions both more accountable and better. Based on the results from
a nationwide survey, the National Center for Postsecondary Improvement (NCPI)
concluded that assessment “initiatives appear to have had little impact on how institutions
have supported or used student assessment to improve their academic performance”
(1999, p. 56).
The initial optimism of assessment advocates may seem unfounded now.
Although faculty have been assessing student learning for a long time, there are still
shifts to be made because it has not been common practice to assess for anything other
than content knowledge in a single course for the purpose of assigning grades. Moving
assessment out of individual classrooms and into the collective consciousness of faculty
is a major shift that affects the day-to-day lives of those who work in university settings
(Phoenix, 2000). The daunting task leaders and assessment advocates share is to
simultaneously stress how assessment is at once consistent with faculty work and
transformative of it, demanding a higher degree of collective action and responsibility for
student learning (Schilling & Schilling, 1998; Wergin, 1995). The necessary changes are
both subtle and pervasive as the best assessment practices require changes in faculty roles
and responsibilities and in the relationships that faculty have with each other and with
students.

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 Often the academic department is the site where desired outcomes for students are
identified and negotiated and plans to assess for these outcomes are made (Banta &
Associates, 1996; Nichols, 1995a; Peterson & Einarson, 1998; Wergin & Swingen,
2001). Ideally, systematic assessment provides useful evidence for departmental decision
making about curriculum and instruction as it has traditionally done for individual
courses. When departments take assessment on, faculty are left to develop ways to share
responsibilities for achieving learning outcomes so that everyone in the department
understands their role in developing and refining these outcomes and makes choices to
realize them.
Because complex student outcomes require agreement about what is most
important and multiple learning opportunities over time to develop, assessment must be
the shared responsibility of everyone in the department. Yet existing work norms make it
unlikely that the assessment focus has shifted from courses to the department level. To
enable the kind of discourse about learning in which faculty articulate the nature and
value of the degrees in their discipline and carry their work through in curricular choices,
shared responsibility will need to become a new norm for faculty work.
Even if willing faculty want to implement assessment, the traditional collegial
model of decision-making in which professors function as a confederation of individuals
rather than as members of a community limits assessment implementation and use of
evidence to individual courses at each professor’s discretion (Huba & Freed, 2000;
Wergin & Swingen, 2001.) These norms of "hollowed collegiality" must change to
enable assessment to take hold as an integral part of faculty work (Massy, Wilger, &
Colbeck, 1996.) The shift away from such norms begins with individuals who choose to
do something different, creating the possibility of spreading new ways of working
(Palmer, 1998.)
Further compounding assessment implementation is the inherent complexity of
faculty work. Faculty in institutions of all kinds must balance higher education’s three
traditional missions: research, teaching, and service. This is especially true now in a
higher education climate that has seen the research mission of the university grow to the
detriment of both teaching and service in institutions of all kinds. Nowhere are the
challenges to assessment implementation greater than in the research university where in
fully one third of undergraduates receive the baccalaureate degree (Kuh & Huh, 2001).
For the faculty members in institutions of all kinds who have tried to make
assessment of student learning integral to their work, compromises in the form of changes
to professional roles, responsibilities, and relationships have almost certainly been
necessary. It may be essential to understand how these individual shifts have altered the
daily lives of the faculty who are pioneering the integration of student outcomes
assessment as well as how their choices may begin to affect departmental norms.
Conversely, it will be necessary to understand how existing faculty work norms shape the
assessment choices that departments make and alter assessment ideals to meet work
realities as faculty perceive and experience them.
The changes necessary to promote assessment are fundamental and unlikely to
result from merely adding assessment to traditional perspectives on faculty work and the
patterns it has engendered (Fairweather, 1993, 1996). It will be necessary to
reconceptualize the relationship between assessment and faculty work as dynamic and

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reciprocal, causing faculty to change the ways in which they assess student learning as
well as the ways in which they work individually and collectively.

Purpose of the Study

Assessment has significant promise as a tool to improve student learning outcomes

and as a response to calls for increased accountability in an era of competition and
retrenchment. Assessment may even help higher education garner necessary resources to
better fulfill its teaching and learning missions. But if assessment of student learning is
to succeed in any way, a much clearer understanding of the implementation process and
its relationship to faculty work is needed. Effective assessment at the program level will
require significant collaboration among faculty, but current faculty norms devalue shared
responsibility.
The purpose of this study is to better understand the relationship between assessment
and faculty work. The study identifies compromises and changes in relationships that
have been necessary in order to develop integrated, comprehensive, program-level
assessment.

Research Questions
Four focal questions about the complex, reciprocal relationship between assessment
and faculty work drive this study:
• How do faculty understand their work in the context of designing and implementing
assessment in their departments?
• How have faculty compromised or changed their work to design and implement
assessment?
• How have they designed and implemented assessment to make it “workable” in their
situations?
• How have relationships changed among faculty members as a result of implementing
assessment?

Definitions
Deriving from the Latin, “to sit beside,” assessment as a term has been used in the
implementation literature in ways that have confused practitioners and probably slowed
adoption of program-level assessment (Terenzini, 1989; Dzimadzi, 1997). For the
purposes of this study, assessment is defined as “student outcomes assessment,” a
common expression for practices that include some common elements. Student learning
outcomes assessment involves the development of a set of core learning objectives or
significant questions related to teaching and learning in the discipline that are then used
to develop curriculum, ensure curricular coherence, improve instructional practices,
inform assessment decisions in courses and programs, and provide evidence for academic
decisions of all kinds. Assessment in this sense is very close to instruction, with
assessment results used within courses to guide decisions about learning and within

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departments to develop and refine the curriculum. In both cases, continuous
improvements to core teaching, learning, and assessment processes result.
Consistent with the framework developed by Wergin and Swingen (2000), this
study further views student outcomes assessments as just one of five means of evaluating
academic departments. The other four ways to evaluate departments are program review,
specialized accreditation, financial accounting initiatives, and internal quality assurance.
Assessment is a significant component of both program evaluation and institutional
research but is not the same as either of these. Writ large, assessment of student learning
outcomes is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of both formative and summative
evaluation and of institutional research to be used for accountability and improvement
(Miller, Imbrie, & Cox, 1998).
Assessment overall has been characterized as including formative (useful for
improvement) and summative (useful for making judgments of value) aspects (Miller &
Associates, 1998; Scriven, 1967; Worthen, Sanders, & Fitzgerald, 1997.) In this study,
assessment is seen as primarily formative, emphasizing that evidence about student
learning is gathered and applied to choices that faculty make as teachers and department
members, and, ultimately, as members of institutions. Assessment is summative only
when assessment evidence is used to make judgments about the quality or value of
processes or products as a part of an evaluation.
While the distinction between formative and summative assessment is not always
clear in practice, protecting the distinction between assessment and evaluation matters
because premature emphasis on large-scale evaluations of programs and institutions can
prevent assessment of student learning from taking hold in courses and departments
(NCPI, 2000). When this is the case, faculty resistance to assessment is understandable
given the role of judgment and potential negative consequences (Schilling & Schilling,
1998). Hence, this study works from the assumption that assessment of student learning
is appropriately placed in faculty hands to guide academic choices that are very close to
the act of teaching, and, therefore, visceral in terms of faculty work (Angelo & Cross,
1993; Hutchings, 2000). For departments wishing to use assessment to improve
programs, formative assessment is the most useful (Ross, Schwaller, Helmin, 2000;
Yogan, 2001).