Assessment in Higher Education

Education Up Close - March 2003,
http://www.glencoe.com/ps/teaching today/educationupclose.phtml

Assessment allows faculty to determine what, and how well students are learning. Assessment also allows faculty to fine tune teaching methods. Finally assessment allows department or divisions heasds to evaluate the effectiveness of entire programs. This article explains the tiered approach at Urbana University:
1) assessment of department or entire program - a rubric is created that assesses the goals of the program. Assessing the course and assessing the whole program allows both individual faculty members and department or division chairs to refine and design course materials that allow for the maximum learning for all students.
2) assessment of the class and individual students is ongoing and provides a continuous monitoring of student learning. Assessmnet of individual students must be an ongoing process throughout the semester and assessment must be able to measure higher level skills.
Most courses lend themselves to a variety of assessment strategies for example oral measures such as speeches, written measures such as writing reports, journalling, participation, as in cooperative or collaborative groups could all be strategies with in a speech course.
as noted in the article regardless of the assessmnet strategy, all assessmnet must focus on improving student learning with a secondary focus on improving teaching methods. Assessment strategies - whether of the individual, the course, or the entire program - give faculty an impressive tool to measure learning. With assessment, educators can find those students who need an extra hand, fine tune their own teaching methods, or redesign whole programs.