It’s crucial that our assessment measures are specific to
departments and disciplines, and are owned by faculty and students.
One of the most important first steps any department can do in
order to approach assessment logically and efficiently is to first
spend time taking an inventory of the shared values of that
department. This can be an ideal way to gather faculty together in
a spirit of mutual inquiry, discussion, and exploration.
Such a preliminary
inventory is important. Many faculty within a department, when
speaking casually to one another at meetings or during hallway
conversations, might initially seem to uphold the same shared
values when it comes to their expectations for student work. Take
student writing, for example—a perpetual hot topic among faculty in
nearly every discipline. When faculty discuss student writing,
their shared values are not infrequently expressed in the negative
as faculty complain and sigh over what they have identified as
their students’ shortcomings. A common complaint many faculty have
heard if not uttered: “My students just can’t write,” a sentiment
that might well elicit mutual nods of affirmation from one’s other
colleagues.
But while this complaint might have value in that it points to a
generalized frustration with the student writing they see in their
courses, the statement remains too vague to be of any pedagogical
value. Obviously, students can write—for if they were literally
functionally illiterate, numerous red flags would have sounded and
they would presumably never have been admitted to college. A
statement like “my students just can’t write” is really shorthand
for a faculty member’s frustration with her students’ inability to
meet certain literacy demands specific to her course and her
discipline. Because if those faculty having that hallway
conversation about lousy student writing were to sit down together
over a series of meetings and carefully articulate what exactly
they mean by that statement, they would begin to identify concerns
that they share, as well as areas where their own personal values
are not in sync. Faculty #1 might be primarily concerned with
preventing students from adopting a first person voice in their
essays; faculty #2 might be more concerned with eliminating a
finite list of common errors; faculty #3’s main concern might be
with getting students to revise their work before submitting it.
Faculty #4 might value all of these things, but be even more
concerned with students’ ability to analyze assigned texts in their
writing. And Faculty #5 might be mostly concerned with her
students’ ability to marshal evidence and propose an argument.
While all of these faculty express shared frustration over “student
writing,” their specific concerns are distinct. Until a department
begins to untangle these many values, and work towards identifying
(and perhaps prioritizing or ranking) those values, that department
will not be able to effectively assess the writing of its
students—for the department has not yet done the necessary work to
identify what, exactly, it means when it refers to “good” and “bad”
writing. Any resultant assessment methods might well be problematic
if not invalid as a result.
And so, departments need to take the time to fully explore, and
argue about, and debate, and ultimately define and articulate their
shared values. Not only is this an ideal way of initiating serious
assessment within a department, but it can be a good way for a
department to—perhaps for the very first time--create a detailed
portrait of what it stands for. Such an activity, taken seriously,
is nothing less than a rigorous exercise in departmental
self-identity.