Editor's Note

The journey toward meaningful, sustainable assessment of student learning remains ongoing and incomplete. Among their legacies, the accountability initiatives of state legislatures and the US Department of Education fostered a determined resistance on the part of many higher education faculty members at all levels and in all geographic settings. Of course, such initiatives remain active and at least equally determined. Yet they are increasingly encountering a new generation of professors and administrators who share the established skepticism of efforts that seem to start with an assumption of ineffectiveness, but do so from a perspective that appreciates the value of outcomes assessment. Rather than merely "circle the wagons" in defense, academic professionals inside and beyond the classroom are patiently building assessment processes that help professors, departments, and institutions to better understand the dynamics of teaching and learning. In contrast to the reporting "snapshots" that have characterized accountability studies, their work seeks to establish more substantive patterns of student performance over time.

The articles contained in JAIE 3.1 effectively represent this shift toward learning-based assessment. Lora Leigh Chrystal, Ann Gansemer-Topf, and Frankie Santos Laanan analyze factors affecting the successful transition of Iowa students from community college to university life. Kenneth Royal and Justin Gregg demonstrate how the Rasch model of psychometric research has improved the accuracy of longitudinal assessment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Sarah Rosaen, Rebecca Hayes, Marcus Paroske, and Danielle De La Mare explain how they used dialogic methods to build support for and trust in general education assessment among communication professors at the University of Michigan-Flint. Charles Powell, interim president of John F. Kennedy University, elects to assess the assessment movement itself, and, most particularly, its impact on accreditation. Together, these authors present an insightful picture of the movement's evolution through contexts that range from community colleges to research universities and from the Pacific Coast, to the Midwest, to the Atlantic Coast. We offer such a rich array of articles, therefore, with the hope that our readers will find them as stimulating as we did.