Two sides of the same coin: authentic assessment

Community College Enterprise, The, Fall 2006 by Berg, Steven L

Dr. Jon Mutiler is a professor of Psychology at North

Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

Dr. Paula Harris is a professor in the Department of Lan

guage, Literature, and Arts at Jackson Community College in

Jackson, Michigan.

Interview with Jon Mueller

Berg: Thank you for talking to us about assessment. What is the big concern about assessment today?

Mueller: It is interesting how we have been giving a lot of attention to assessment at the K-12 level for a number of years, but it is really starting to hit the college level more recently. Primarily that is coming from the increased desire for accountability. And so colleges are feeling the heat from accrediting agencies to demonstrate that students are actually getting something from their education. You need to measure it and assess it and provide evidence that students are meeting these outcomes. We are being told that we are to start doing what we should have been doing all along - identify the student learning outcomes, the important things that we value, that we think that students should come away with. And then find effective ways to measure outcomes to demonstrate that students are actually getting this value from their education.

Berg: Don't grades do that? They can show that a certain percentage of students passed a class and a certain percentage didn't.

Mueller: That has been the argument for years - that we assess and we identify within our classes what our outcomes are and grade based upon that. But I think a lot of the push comes from all these surveys where we find that graduates or adult Americans are lacking in many skills and certain areas of knowledge, so people have questioned whether seat time in a class is really a good measure of this; can we really be confident that students are getting the value added in education or acquiring the knowledge and skills that they need for work and life just because they passed and received that diploma? So many people are questioning and want more direct evidence showing that they can actually do these things and know these things rather than just a transcript.

Berg: As I am sure you're aware, on the day this interview is taking place, secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is having a press conference dealing with some of these issues. We don't have access to what she is going to say. But I would like to know what the people who are pushing assessment at the national level are asking educators to do that they are not already doing?

Mueller: They are asking us to do very reasonable things that, in fact, many of us as faculty have not been doing -at least not systematically. And that is, first of all, spelling out and articulating clearly what my goals are for my students, both across the curriculum and across the college, both within my individual discipline and even within my individual courses. Unfortunately, if you ask many faculty to show you a list of their student learning outcomes for their course or for their department, many will not be able to present those to you; they haven't been articulated sufficiently yet. So that is the first step we are being asked to do. It is a reasonable step. We should be able to articulate exactly what it is we want students to know and to do once they graduate.

Berg: Is there anything else?

Mueller: Then they are asking us to come up with meaningful measures which will demonstrate that students have met these particular outcomes or goals we have written. Don't just tell me "Here is the way I grade them." Directly tie your assessment to the outcomes. Show me that if students did well on these particular assessments that will provide good evidence that they have met those particular outcomes.

Berg: I could see someone say that we have course objectives. Aren't the clear goals our course objectives?

Mueller: They can be. And in some cases they are. For years, some faculty have spelled out course objectives or goals or whatever they have called them. However, many faculty still have not. So I can understand some faculty saying "I am already doing that." It is true that many faculty are. But it is also true that many faculty have not been doing that.

Berg: In one of my first steps to tie assessment to the course objectives, for a final project I asked students to react to each of the course objectives and explain how they met them during the semester.

Mueller: Yes.

Berg: I discovered that our course objectives were incomprehensible.

Mueller: It is not an easy thing to do - to write good course objectives. We were not trained in writing objectives. Unfortunately, even if you look at teacher education programs for individuals who are going out in the K-12 level, many of them - even though they have gone through four years of training -were not adequately trained to do assessment. Those of us who teach at the college level received even less training. So it is one thing to say that I have written objectives. It is another to say that I have done them well. More importantly, even if I have good objectives, many times the assessments I give -the assignments and tasks -don't match up with those objectives and are not really tapping into whether students have met them or not.