The Role of Assessment

First, what are we assessing and why? The panel agreed that at root we are concerned with assessing student learning. Consequently, assessment should be used as a tool in the pursuit of providing a clear understanding and enhancement of student learning. To answer the question's second part, why we assess student learning, we must first determine what we ultimately want students to learn in political science. Thus, the first goal of assessment must be to develop a clear outline of the specific skills, values, and knowledge content (significant learning) that we want students to obtain from individual classes and from the political science curriculum as a whole. This will provide criteria that will allow us to determine whether students are learning.

The Uses of Assessment

Should assessment be viewed as a goal or as a tool? Administrators may be predisposed to consider assessment as a goal due to institutional and legislative pressures to compare programs and institutions. Faculty members tend to resist assessment when it is used for this purpose. Conversely, faculty view assessment as a means to the ultimate end—the enhancement of student learning. Specifically, faculty regard assessment as a tool and learning as the goal. The panel established that assessment should be used to determine student learning outcomes, discover teaching strengths and deficiencies, and make curriculum changes, with the ultimate goal of increasing student learning opportunities. While assessment may take many different forms, and there may be many different uses, all of these goals should converge to enhance student learning.

The Inevitability of Assessment

Increasingly assessment is being forced upon faculty by administrators and legislators. As faculty members we must use this opportunity to shape the assessment process. Fundamentally, we should take charge of assessment. There must be a concerted effort to examine how other disciplines that have developed proficient assessment techniques, such as sociology and nursing, use assessment, and then employ those methods that best underscore the purposes that matter most, enhanced student learning. It was suggested that the APSA create a clearinghouse of tools for assessment on its web site with links to other competent assessment programs (e.g., nursing, psychology, and sociology), develop a task force on assessment, hold workshops at regional meetings, and include panels on the politics of assessment at the next Teaching and Learning Conference.

Approaches to Assessment

There are several different approaches to assessment. In particular, the panel outlined three characteristics of assessment: assessment of learning, for learning, and as learning (Earl 2003). Assessment of learning uses traditional assessment techniques, such as exams, papers, and tests, to determine what students are currently learning in their classes. Assessment of learning is summative in nature. Assessment for learning, a formative approach to assessment, observes what students are learning and where there are deficiencies on an on-going basis. This characteristic of assessment employs such techniques as students submitting a note card each week with questions that they may have. The final characteristic of assessment, assessment as learning, uses different assessment techniques, such as having students write self-reflection papers, their own political autobiographies, peer reviews, and engaging student participation as a means to encourage civic engagement.

How We Do Assessment

The overarching point that resulted from this discussion was that assessment requires multiple tools, and that the tools themselves must be flexible. Standardized assessment tools, such as IDEA forms, retention rates, GPAs, and GRE scores, are popular with administrators and legislators as they facilitate a comparison of institutions and allow for national rankings. In contrast, faculty members are typically opposed to student and faculty assessment on the basis of solely standardized means. Using only standardized assessment measures pressures faculty members to “teach to the test” in order to improve department or institutional standings. This contravenes the purpose of higher education and academic freedom, and it does not allow for assessment of educational experiences that are difficult to test from a standardized perspective, such as internships and study abroad programs. While some amount of standardized testing is inevitable, faculty, departments, and administrators must be diligent in developing and employing other forms of assessment, such as entrance and exit interviews, alumni surveys, and intern debriefings, to be used in conjunction with standardized tests.

The purpose of the session was to investigate assessment and learning outcomes. Through the course of presentations and discussion we tackled this issue and explored new approaches to assessment that show the importance of having clearly outlined course goals and the use of assessment as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Further discussion analyzed the different uses of assessment, of learning, for learning, and as learning, which evolved to include the different approaches for which assessment may be used. Although faculty may be resistant to standardized assessment, it is inevitable. Therefore it is in our best interest to find multiple, flexible methods of assessment to be used in conjunction with standardized means to meet our ultimate goal—enhanced student learning outcomes.