Promoting Integrated and Transformative Assessment: A Deeper Focus on Student Learning (review)

In the past five years, a variety of scholars in higher education have written numerous assessment books. Most provide a comprehensive review of the entire assessment cycle while others provide real examples of assessment practice in student and academic affairs. Catherine Wehlburg’s timely Promoting Integrated and Transformative Assessment provides an innovative way to examine assessment by focusing on its transformative nature. This focus is a departure from merely reviewing the assessment cycle for practitioners. Transformative assessment emphasizes that assessment should be designed to provide information that is essential in transforming teaching and learning.

Many faculty and administrators have collected assessment data, but the challenge is how to use this information to make informed changes. Wehlburg’s major contribution is its intended focus on assessment as a process that “will inform decision making that is appropriate, meaningful, sustainable, flexible, and ongoing and will use data for improvement with the potential for substantive change” (p. 13). Throughout this book, Wehlburg communicates her hope that college faculty, staff, and administrators will use assessment to strengthen student learning.

The author begins this book with a concise review of the history of assessment including requirements for accountability purposes and how assessment can enhance teaching and learning. Equally important, she discusses key challenges to integrating assessment into higher education. She then carefully examines institutional dynamics, including how assessment can be organized and how to create a supportive climate.

Getting faculty support is sometimes a challenge, and this book presents various strategies to encourage professors’ engagement in the entire assessment cycle including writing outcomes, identifying relevant direct measures, developing indirect methods such as surveys, and using assessment results.

Another crucial chapter addresses the problem of integrating assessment into student affairs and campus-wide assessment efforts. Unfortunately, it is sparse on practical strategies for actually making integrations successful, instead briefly expressing the ideal that faculty members and student affairs staff will collaborate with each other. While Wehlburg stresses the importance of communication and building trust to create a community, this chapter lacks sufficient information about how to really foster such conditions.

Aligning the institutional mission with assessment is important in creating a meaningful institutional effectiveness program. Wehlburg’s chapter on this important topic identifies three different activities: collecting data, analyzing data, and using the results to lead to enhancement. She defines institutional effectiveness as a “formal, ongoing, and systematic process that measures quality to ensure the institution and others that the performance level matches the stated purpose of the institution” (p. 100). This chapter is valuable since Wehlburg carefully provides an overview of the major elements of an institutional effectiveness plan.

The author also discusses how to implement assessment at the institutional level and embed assessment activities across the college or university. Faculty members often prefer course-embedded assessments to determine if their students are meeting the expectations of their academic programs, and Wehlburg provides a balanced discussion of the advantages and challenges associated with authentic assessments used to gather information about student learning.

She also devotes a chapter to exploring how assessment can be used to support ongoing accreditation and accountability efforts. The discussion of regional accreditors is helpful but lacking is a review of professional accrediting organizations and their influence on assessment.

The book concludes with a focus on the future of transformation and assessment’s continuing importance. Wehlburg highlights the need for increased accountability so that valid comparisons can be made among colleges and universities. According to the author, this accountability mandates using such commercially developed instruments as the National Survey of Student Engagement or the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). Thanks to changes in technology, many more students can now take assessments like the CLA online rather than using the traditional paper version. She also calls for more attention on assessing students’ skills in teamwork and working collaboratively with others.

Promoting Integrated and Transformative Assessment is valuable for practitioners and even beginning graduate students who want a...