In this post, I want to explore connections between departmental assessment projects and teaching excellence. I do this because I think it is easy to feel that the departmental assessment projects we are asked to do are disconnected from the things we care most deeply about. Too often, we may not see the ways that departmental assessment projects can promote a culture of excellent teaching in our departments and across campus.
There are good reasons to be skeptical of assessment, but when done well, assessment is meant to help departments learn about how students are experiencing the major.
Backing up, assessment is about determining meaningful learning goals, and then determining valid and reliable assessments that demonstrate whether students are meeting those learning goals. Part of the goal of assessment is making explicit what many of us take for granted as skillful practitioners in our disciplines. For many of us, life as a historian or a chemist, or an artist is second-nature. We know good work when we see it, and we know how to teach ourselves when we are stuck.
Because we ended up on the other end of our education as skillful practitioners, it is easy to trust that the paths we took to get where we are worked (more or less). When we look to evaluate our programs of study, we assess them against the program of studies we experienced as students (or we assess them against programs that we wish we experienced as students.)
Though there is some wisdom to this approach, advocates of assessment want us to be more intentional, especially when thinking about students with different backgrounds and different trajectories than ours. Though a sequence of courses may’ve worked well enough for us, assessment demands that we ask: How is it working for our current students? And in order to respond to this question, we need to (1) know where we want students to end up, and (2) have a plan for assessing student progress toward that end.
It is with this in mind that I want to share a beautiful document put together by the American Psychological Association. The APA convened a sub-committee to answer the question: What should an introductory course in psychology look like? I encourage you to read the document as a way of appreciating the challenges of answering this question in our respective fields. Each of us may teach an introductory course. Each of us may’ve even designed an introductory course. And almost all of us will have taken many introductory courses in many fields. But all of this experience may not fully prepare us to answer the question: What should an introductory course look like?
As we approach departmental assessment projects at SLU, I think it is useful to think seriously about what we hope our graduates will leave knowing, understanding, and able to do. With this graduate in mind, we work backward to assessments. What assessments would demonstrate that our students are on track to becoming that type of graduate? If we do this, then we have a better way of conceptualizing excellent teaching. What types of course designs and course activities help our students make progress toward our departmental learning goals? This is what excellent teaching is. It is teaching that helps our students become the graduates we hope they become.
When everything is aligned like this–when our teaching is driven by our aims–assessment becomes less of a chore, and it becomes more integral to our lives as teacher-scholars who are committed to giving our students an inspiring and demanding undergraduate education in the liberal arts.
Easier said than done. But the more we can see the purpose and goods of assessment, the easier it will be to create departmental assessment projects that matter.