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

Mark Twain observed: “As to the adjective: When in doubt, strike it out.” I, too, am weary of adjectives, especially when they attempt to distinguish book titles. Catherine Wehlburg’s 2008 publication, Promoting Integrated and Transformative Assessment: A Deeper Focus on Student Learning, is an exception. She makes the case that assessment suggests many things, most of which renders educators into a defensive stance. Qualifying assessment as both integrative and transformative drives home an important message: Articulating learning outcomes, collecting data, and interpreting results to make informed curricular decisions are not auxiliary functions of higher education but essential practices that should be bent on improving students’ learning and development. An integrated and transformative assessment process implies unity and change. Her book describes how and why higher education institutions should adopt these characteristics.

Wehlburg relies on her firm grasp of the literature to explain how educators can collaborate and design assessment strategies to capture meaningful information, setting the stage for transparent actions to alter the curriculum for the benefit of students. The book is not structured to describe assessment strategies with specificity. Instead, the purpose of the book is to describe a strategic approach to assessment that advances important characteristics, including being appropriate, meaningful, sustainable, flexible, and ongoing. These qualities distinguish transformative from traditional assessment plans, which tend to satisfy short-term and periodic accountability demands.

The book is organized to explain first the definition and benefits of “transformative” assessment plans. Wehlburg also offers a rich historical perspective, which is particularly useful for educators who are not familiar with the development of assessment and its role in higher education. Assessment is often viewed, at least implicitly, as a way to meet accountability demands. This perception may invite cynical efforts of compliance and minimizes the focus on student learning and its improvement. History teaches us about the importance of countering traditional conceptions with a more transformative, integrated view of assessment. Uniting all stakeholders, capturing data that people care about, and using results to make decisions are essentials that shift an assessment plan from a perfunctory to a consequential practice of higher education.

Several chapters delineate some practical advice for educational leaders. For example, Wehlburg explains the “pillars” of transformative assessment. While assessment plans may be somewhat unique given the diverse missions of higher education institutions, transformative and integrated assessment plans share some traits, such as a sense of trust and a common language, that unite educators. Educators across academic departments and student affairs must believe that assessment data are driven to identify areas of curricular weaknesses as opportunities for substantial improvement. Educators must also be motivated to take responsibility for student learning. A shared language and unified purpose help build a community that can “close the loop” between retrieving assessment data and using findings to make teaching and learning modifications.

Most of the book offers sensible ways to fuse an assessment plan’s characteristics with an institutional environment. For example, Wehlburg cites Banta’s (2005) work that describes how to identify an “assessment champion” and Washington State University’s (2003) guide to ascertain whether an assessment plan is aligned with a transformative process. On page 91, Wehlburg offers reflective questions that help establish whether communication between campus units exists on a level making transformative and integrative assessment possible. These are just a few strategies that she details to help create a spirit of cooperation that engages educators into “a deeper focus on student learning.”

The last few chapters consider how transformative assessment can strike a balance between the need for accountability and improvement of student learning. Flexibility and transparency may be the keys that will help educators overcome legitimate concerns, such as dealing with limitations of standardized tests, framing areas of concern as opportunities for improvement, and preserving a space for the exploration of innovative curricular changes. Future efforts to develop transformative assessment plans will benefit from the advancement of technology and...