LiberalArtsOnline Volume 4, Number 8
September 2004
This month the Center of Inquiry introduces the Assessment Toolkit to help institutions with their assessment efforts. The toolkit offers detailed information on a wide variety of instruments and practices. It focuses on identifying assessment strategies and tactics that are especially useful for strengthening liberal arts education. In this issue of LiberalArtsOnline, we describe how the Assessment Toolkit was developed, what it contains, ways campus communities can utilize it, and our plans for its further expansion. We are eager to hear from you about instruments and practices you would like to see added to this online service.
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A New Tool for Liberal Arts Assessment
by Kimberly A. Kline, Research Fellow,
and Charles F. Blaich, Director of Inquiries
Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
Assessment is the Achilles heel of liberal arts colleges. Despite increasingly strident calls for accountability and institutional report cards from policy makers, many liberal arts faculty, staff, and administrators remain stubbornly opposed to the dreaded "A-word," doing the minimum necessary to meet the demands of outside agencies and accreditors.
Our reluctance to embrace assessment is, in many ways, understandable. By choosing to work at liberal arts colleges, we have already made a commitment to teaching that separates us from many of our colleagues at larger, research-focused institutions. The teaching-focused culture of our institutions means we are already pouring an enormous amount of energy into teaching and the administrative work that supports good teaching. In the space occupied by this commitment, there is little room left for assessment. It is no surprise then that discussions about assessment at liberal arts colleges often take on the tenor of defending the ramparts of the liberal arts against the onslaught of outsiders who are tone deaf to its values and virtues.
There is no doubt that ham-handed assessment can miss the impact of the liberal arts. But we should consider two things before we dismiss assessment entirely. First, the external pressure to assess our impact on students will continue to increase. This pressure is not merely rhetorical, but may ultimately come in the form of provisos attached to federal and state financial aid for our students. The challenge this creates will be especially strong for liberal arts colleges because they are more likely to embrace powerful, but assessment resistant, student goals such as thoughtfulness, openness, humanity, curiosity, and creativity. Second, beyond this practical concern, the most important reason for thinking more about assessment is that we would contradict our own commitment to teaching if we did not at least investigate the possibility that some forms of assessment might help us become better teachers.
The formal call for the use of student outcomes assessment in higher education can be traced back to a movement that began in the mid 1980s. The American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and the National Institute of Higher Education (NIE) called a meeting in 1984 to discuss a report entitled "Involvement in Learning," written by the Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in Higher Education. (Note 1) Since that time, an enormous amount of good work has been done toward developing assessment techniques and approaches. Moreover, faculty and staff, who have been "assessing" student learning for as long as there have been classes, also have exceptional expertise.
Nonetheless, many of us continue to struggle with assessment. Often smaller liberal arts institutions do not have personnel with extensive training in assessment. Faculty and staff who spearhead assessment efforts at these institutions frequently do not have the time or background necessary to review the wide range of assessment instruments and techniques available to them. The challenges assessment raises for small liberal arts colleges led us to the idea of creating an online "Assessment Toolkit" to give institutions straight-forward information on various ways to conduct assessment. The result is a collection of reviews of assessment instruments and methodologies designed to assist institutions in their assessment endeavors.
The Assessment Toolkit was developed with various people's needs in mind. These might include the faculty member in Biology or Classics who has just been appointed to the assessment strategic planning committee; a philosopher who has to head up the accreditation visit; the Director of Residence Life who has now been given the added responsibility of assessment initiatives for Student Affairs; or an Institutional Researcher who needs an accessible document to share with administrators on a particular survey.
To start the toolkit, we selected tools and methodologies that were most commonly referenced in our interactions with liberal arts institutions. Then, we invited fourteen assessment experts from across the country to a workshop to develop short, clear reviews of these instruments. These can be found on the Center of Inquiry's website at http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/assessment.
What you will find on our website is a first step. Our goal is to develop an easy-to-use website which allows you to access information on instruments based on your specific needs. At present, you can view instruments based on the following questions: (1) Are you interested in assessing certain outcomes? (2) Are you interested in a particular instrument? (3) Are you interested in qualitative forms of assessment?
The instruments we reviewed include The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), a survey that measures characteristics of entering undergraduate students; Your First College Year (YFCY), a survey designed to provide higher education practitioners and researchers with comprehensive information on the academic and personal development of first-year college students; The College Student Survey (CSS), a survey which provides feedback on students' academic and campus life experiences; The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a 50-question paper and pencil inventory of statements expressing varied attitudes toward cultural difference; and The Measure of Moral Orientation (MMO), an instrument that measures the ethics of care and justice as typically associated with the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. In addition, we reviewed various qualitative methodologies also useful to practitioners such as case studies, interviews, institutional documents and records, and written materials like essays and journals.
In September we will gather nine reviewers to evaluate our next group of assessment instruments. These instruments include tests of reflective judgment (Reasoning about Current Issues Test), moral judgment (Defining Issues Test [DIT-2]), leadership (the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale [SRLS] and the Leadership Practices Inventory [LPI]), and the extent to which people enjoy engaging in difficult thinking (Need for Cognition Scale).
We view this project as a collaborative work-in-progress and welcome any feedback you have on the current Assessment Toolkit. Please feel free to contact assessment@wabash.edu with suggestions for additional instruments, methods, and approaches.
References
1. Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in Higher Education (1984). Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.