Category: Assessing Assessing

Information and Educational Assessment I

In a letter to the NYT about an article on radiation overdoses, George Lantos writes:

My stroke neurologists and I have decided that if treatment does not yet depend on the results, these tests should not be done outside the context of a clinical trial, no matter how beautiful and informative the images are. At our center, we have therefore not jumped on the bandwagon of routine CT perfusion tests in the setting of acute stroke, possibly sparing our patients the complications mentioned.

This raises an important, if nearly banal, point: if you don’t have an action decision that depends on a piece of information, don’t spend resources (or run risks) to obtain the information.  The exception, as he suggests, is when you are doing basic science of some sort.

Now consider, for a moment, the practice of “assessment” in contemporary higher education.  An industry has built up around the idea of measuring educational outcomes in which a phenomenal amount of energy (and grief) is invested to produce information that is (1) of dubious validity and (2) does not, in general, have a well articulated relationship to decisions.

Now the folks who work in the assessment industry are all about “evidence based change,” but they naively expect that they can, a priori, figure out what information will be useful for this purpose.

They fetishize the idea of “closing the loop” — bringing assessment information to bear on curriculum decisions and practices — but they confuse the means and the ends.  To show that we are really doing assessment we have to find a decision that can be based on the information that has been collected.  Not quite the “garbage can model of decision-making,” but close.

Perhaps a better approach (and one that would demonstrate an appreciation of basic critical thinking skills) to improving higher education would be to START by identifying opportunities for making decisions about how things are done and THEN figuring out what information would allow us to make the right decision and THEN how we would best collect said information.  Such an approach would involve actually understanding both the educational process and the way educational organizations work.  My impression is that it is precisely a lack of understanding and interest in these things on the part of the assessment crowd that leads them to get the whole thing backwards.  Only time will tell whether these scientist-manqués manage to mediocritize higher education or not.

Let’s Take It Seriously

Let’s take assessment and accountability seriously AS AN INSTITUTION. There is a tendency to equate assessment with measuring what professors do to/with students. The buzz word is “accountability” and there’s this unspoken assumption that the locus of lack of accountability in higher education is the faculty. I think that assumption is wrong.

We should broaden the concept of assessment to the whole institution. Course instructors get feedback on an almost daily basis — students do or don’t show up for class; instructors face 20 to 100 faces projecting boredom or engagement several times per week; students write papers and exams that speak volumes about whether they are learning anything; advisees tell faculty about how good their colleagues are. By contrast, the rest of the institution has little, if any, opportunity for feedback. It’s important: one substandard administrative act can affect the entire faculty, so even small things can have a big negative effect on learning outcomes.

In the name of accountability throughout the institution I propose something simple, but concrete: every form or memo should have a “feedback button” on it. Clicking on this button will allow “users” anonymously to offer suggestions or criticism. These should be recorded in a blog format — that is, they accumulate and are open to view. At the end of each year, the accountable officer would be required in her or his annual report to tally these comments and respond to them, indicating what was learned, what changes have been made or why changes were not made.

The important component of this is that the comments are PUBLIC so that constituents can see what others are saying. Each “user” can see whether her ideas are commonly held or idiosyncratic and the community can know what kind of feedback an office is receiving and judge its responsiveness accordingly.

Why anonymous? This is feedback, not evaluation. This information cannot be used to penalize or injure anyone. The office has opportunity to respond either immediately or in an annual report. Crank comments will be weeded out by sheer numbers and users who will contradict them. In the other direction, it is clear that honest feedback can be compromised by concerns about retribution, formal or informal. Further analysis along these lines would further support the idea that comments should be (at least optionally) anonymous.

We should note that we already do all of this in principle — many offices around campus have some version of a “suggestion box.” What is missing is (1) systematic and consistent implementation so that users get accustomed to the process of providing feedback, and (2) a protocol for using the feedback to enrich the community knowledge pool and to build it into an actual accountability structure.

The last paragraph makes the connection to a sociology of information. Information asymmetries (as when the recipient knows what the aggregate opinion is, but the “public” does not) and the atomization of polities (this is what happens when opinion collection is done in a way that minimizes interactions among the opinion holders — cf. Walmart not wanting employees to discuss working conditions — preventing the formation of open, collective knowledge*) are a genuine obstacle to organizational improvement. Many, many private organizations have learned this; it’s not entirely surprising that colleges and universities are the last to get on board.

* as opposed, say, to things that might be called “open secrets”

Validity and Such

An AACU blogpost referred me to the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment website which referred me to an ETS website about the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (MAPP) where I would be able to read an article titled “Validity of the Measure of academic Proficiency and Progress .”

And here’s the upshot of that article: The MAPP is basically the same as the test it replaced and research on that test showed

…that the higher scores of juniors and seniors could be explained almost entirely by their completion of more of the core curriculum, and that completion of advanced courses beyond the core curriculum had relatively little impact on Academic Profile scores. An earlier study (ETS, 1990) showed that Academic Profile scores increased as grade point average, class level and amount of core curriculum completed increased.

In other words, the test is a good measure of whether students took more GenEd courses. And we suppose that in GenEd courses students are acquiring GenEd skills. And so these tests are measures of the GenEd skills we want students to learn.

A tad circular? What exactly is the information value added by this test?