Doing Assessment As If Learning Matters Most

After nearly two decades of uphill struggle, the “assessment movement ” has reached a promising plateau. In general, US higher education has moved beyond unproductive, dualistic debates – do you remember, “four legs good, two legs bad ” from Animal Farm? – over whether assessment should focus on accountability or improvement. Today, most faculty and academic administrators have finally, if reluctantly, come to accept that dealing with both is a political and economic inevitability. Nonetheless, most of us think assessment should be, first and foremost, about improving student learning and, secondarily, about determining accountability for the quality of learning produced. In short, though accountability matters, learning still matters most. This realignment of opinion hasn’t occurred by chance, of course. Since the mid-1980s, a dedicated and widely dispersed cadre of activists and opinion leaders from higher education associations (notably AAHE), regional and professional accrediting agencies, disciplinary societies, and campuses far and wide, have each and all urged us to use assessment to improve learning quality and productivity. In response, tens of thousands of faculty and administrators on hundreds of campuses have endured speeches, labored