Primary Trait Analysis: Anchoring Assessment in the Classroom

Introduction

The assessment of learning and teaching is a valuable endeavor, however onerous or ominous. Unfortunately, the difficulty of assessment often prevents potential assessors from beginning the project, even though the necessity of public accountability forces action. The assessment of a general education should be designed, implemented, and evaluated by faculty in colleges where departments have considerable autonomy, but must still cooperate at the institutional level. The ownership involves faculty designing, implementing, and evaluating student learning. It is our position that three issues are central to assessment: First, general education must be defined appropriately in the context of the students' academic programs. Second, assessment must have a direct relationship with teaching and learning. Finally, and most important, the process must be centered where the actual teaching and learning take place, that is, in the classroom. Only when these three issues are addressed will the students, faculty, and administrators find an assessment process that all can support. We propose Primary Trait Analysis (PTA) as the process that unites the assessment goals of students, faculty, and administrators and anchors general education assessment in the classroom.

Institutions frequently realize general education as a set of core courses that include the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences (North Central Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Institutions of Higher Education [NCA], 1997). However, many 2-year institutions have transient student populations whose professional and transfer programs cannot accommodate the luxury of a separate core curriculum. The value of a general education has not waned, so in order to retain the ideals of general education and continue to accommodate a nontraditional student body, we must expand our definition of how a general education is realized. At Raymond Walters College, our mission statement reflects our educational philosophy:

The college strives to provide a general education which promotes tolerance, lifelong learning and a devotion to free inquiry and free expression, to assure its graduates are individuals of character more sensitive to the needs of community, more competent to contribute to society, and more civil in habits of thought, speech and action. ("Functional Mission Statement," 1998)

The goal of general education at Raymond Walters College is to provide students, regardless of specialization, with a broad learning experience that enables them to become informed, responsible, thoughtful citizens. While general education has often been structured as a core curriculum, the assessment guidelines of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Institutions of Higher Education (NCA) suggest that a general education may also be articulated as a set of specific skills students acquire throughout their studies (NCA, 1997). If a general education is a set of skills, then instructors identify where each particular skill is taught. Students encounter many skill lessons as they progress through college.

Regardless of program, general education skills must be assessed appropriately. Because academic assessment measures student learning outcomes, where, when, and how the measurement takes place is critical to the usefulness of the assessment. If the outcomes measured by a testing instrument do not match an instruct-or's goals, the usefulness of the measure is limited, for the instructor is unable to use the results to improve teaching and learning (Walvoord & Anderson, 1998, p. 169; Lopez, 1996). Outcomes measured by national standardized tests inform test administrators of general trends, but this information is rarely used to improve student learning, unless the students are learning the skills of the standardized test (Walvoord, Bardes & Denton, 1998). While the scores of the Graduate Record Exam or the Test of English as a Foreign Language clearly inform the specialized courses designed to prepare students for these tests, they do not inform graduate school curricula or English curricula, and, in fact, they were never designed to do so. And while the scores of an English writing test given to the entire student body will...