Editor's Note

Assessment continued to be a focus in the higher education press this year, and not necessarily in a good way. One of the most notable reports was published in Inside Higher Ed (Lederman, 2019) in which a panel of assessment professionals and accreditors characterized assessment efforts to date as a "hot mess." One of the questions going forward from here is what the essay characterized as "What might round 2 look like?" If assessment efforts are not achieving what they should, how do we move forward? What aspects of assessment work should we keep, which could we change, and which might we toss?

The problem highlighted in that essay (and in other places as well) is that assessment serves two masters: accountability and improvement of student learning. The accountability role remains critical because pressure on higher education to justify itself is not declining. But the administrative and bureaucratic pressure on assessment as a component of accreditation is probably the reason that faculty disdain for assessment processes and requirements remains high. A survey reported on in October 2018 (Lederman, 2018) noted that nearly 60% of faculty see assessment as being primarily about satisfying accreditors and not being about student learning. And essays critical of assessment abound.

So what might Assessment 2.0 look like? In part, assessment might turn away from concerns about accreditation and focus on identifying what matters to some of the stakeholders within higher education. For example, Culver and Phipps in this issue asked faculty members to weigh in on what they see as the values of assessment. Rather than bemoan a lack of faculty engagement and wonder how to create that engagement, they went straight to the source. While faculty noted the importance for accreditation, they also saw curricular improvement as a value. An important takeaway from their article is that identifying faculty values can be important for building faculty engagement in assessment.

Ben-Avie and Darrow provide a thorough and compelling argument that what we do with our students has a bigger impact than their characteristics prior to enrollment. Their evidence supports the idea that helping our students to develop psychologically is more important than the variables that tend to be used to evaluate and rank colleges and universities, such as SAT scores and high school performance measures.

Mahalingam and Blumberg remind us that assessment efforts focusing on improvement are more valuable than focusing on accreditation per se. They report on success in identifying and repairing areas that needed improvement and showed greater learning gains as a result of those efforts.

Consistent with calls for more rigorous methods in assessment that even involve a hypothesis-testing methodology, Shankar reports on a faculty-driven combination of direct and indirect methods for measuring student learning in an engineering course, using hypothesis tests to ensure the robustness of the measures, and found improvements in student understanding of the course material by the end of the term.

Johnson, Weidner, Jones and Manwell report on the development of a measure of course rigor. Although their work does not directly address student learning, they provide a measure of the kind of context in which student learning might be enhanced by the kind of pedagogy faculty would favor.