Program Assessment

My goal for the beginning of this week was to focus on the program perspective of assessment. My initial thoughts on program assessment was that is is used strictly for accreditation purposes, what I have learned is that is can be so much more for institutions if implemented based on student learning and not just for accreditation purpose. Ironically I find it very sad that I have been in higher education for a few years (as an adjunct-which may be a reason for my lack of knowledge) and other than NCATE (which) I assumed was another 'hoop' to jump through to obtain accreditation and is only based on what courses were taught in a program. I decided that I would use this first assignment for the blog to learn more about program assessment. What I found was that the possible reason for my lack of knowledge about program assessment is that in many colleges/universities the resistance from faculty on assessing programs for student learning outcomes can be difficult because of the possible issues arising in evaluation of the faculty members instead of the program and that faculty are so busy teaching to the course learning outcomes that often looking at the 'big picture' outcomes can be placed on the back burner.
I found this blog entry from the Chronicle on Assessment in Higher Education by Stan Katz: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Assessment-in-Higher-Ed/7489/ In this blog entry article, the Katz spoke of assessment and the use of assessment in student learning based on a study conducted by Ikenberry which found was that most assessments at the program level are being used for accreditation requirements, but not necessarily at the institutional level partly because of faculty resistance. From my understanding, this type of assessment is of a summative nature. Shouldn't institutions be looking more at formative assessments to gauge student learning? The author suggested that part of the reason for this is that the learning outcomes tend to be very generalized. From our class discussion, I would label these as 'goals' if they are generalized to the point of being difficult to measure. Another issues in an article titled: Many Colleges Assess Learning but may not use data to improve survey finds: http://chronicle.com/article/Many-Colleges-Assess-Learni/47892/ discussed that much of the data collected through assessment measures is not being used to improve teaching and learning, instead it is being used strictly for accreditation. These two articles led me to a website titled: Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/ which is a higher education assessment site that colleges can use to assess the learning of students through working with faculty, program chairs, and administration. Much of the assessment touted by CLA is of an authentic nature and in helping colleges with programmatic change that is then compared with other universities, however they do state that they do not rank universities based on scores, instead they highlight differences that can lead to improvements. I find this somewhat curious. It seems to be standardized testing gone commercial. The other factor with CLA is that the testing is not discipline-specific, rather it is on general education skills and does not test all students, rather just a random sampling of students in a pre-post test ability. I'm not a fan of this type of assessment because I think it lacks in relevance to the specific goals for each university. There is an initiative by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) http://www.ncahlc.org/download/PathwaysOverview1009092.pdf for a new model titled 'Open Pathway' for accreditation in which institutions are put together with 'peer institutions' to work together in creating a "systemic comprehensive assessment of student learning"(p.3). What I like about this is the pairing of two-year colleges with four year colleges to create a plan for "internationalizing the entire curriculum" (p.3). The goal of this new model is to allow institutions to, "take risks and aim high" in the commitment of student learning.
Overall, what I found is that program assessment is a highly bureaucratic and in-depth process of assessment of student learning outcomes at the program and institutional level.
Sheri