Higher Education Assessments: Leadership Matters (review)

Higher Education Assessments: Leadership Matters provides rich material to advance thinking and discussing assessment in higher education. Writing for top-level campus leaders, editors Gary Kramer and Randy Swing have organized the text in three parts.

Part 1, “Leading Assessments on the Campus,” speaks directly to high-level campus leaders: presidents, provosts, vice presidents, and deans. Encompassing two chapters, it argues that a culture of assessment provides a unique lens and “data story” through which leaders may focus internal and external conversations about the institution’s mission, successes, challenges, and opportunities for growth and investment.

Chapter 1 serves as Assessment 101. Authors Trudy Bers and Randy Swing bring education leaders up to speed on concepts and terms. They explore the rising tide of expectations for institutions to provide meaningful data to support educational claims.

This chapter sets the stage for learning outcomes as the key institutional framework for assessment practice and differentiates assessment methods and approaches. Bers and Swing conclude by distilling the critical issues and challenges that higher education leaders face in creating a campus culture of assessment.

Asserting that “senior leaders must assert their political wisdom and leadership talents in directing use of purposeful assessments to guide strategic planning within existing budget constraints in meaningful and credible ways” (p. 27), in Chapter 2, Gary Kramer, Coral Hanson, and Danny Olson posit six critical factors that institutional leaders must implement as an effective framework for campus assessment efforts. These are intentional assessments, engaged stakeholders, an integrated database, a master calendar, timely reports, and a culture of evidence.

The chapter excellently juxtaposes research findings and assessment best-practices with concrete examples of assessment documents and plans that illustrate the sorts of work products that senior leaders should expect from deans, department chairs, institutional researchers, and other institutional managers.

Part 2, “Bridging Learner Outcomes: Finding Common Ground,” includes four chapters that draw out the complexity and nuance incumbent in decision-making around assessment plans and practices.

In Chapter 3, Vasti Torres explains how campus diversity efforts may be supported by and closely aligned with assessment. She discusses three common forms of diversity assessment: structural forms that use large data sets to parse learning or other outcomes by demographic categories, educational activities that attempt to shift student attitudes towards diverse others or reduce bias, and those that describe the climate of the campus for underrepresented groups.

Torres makes an essential case that disaggregating assessment data to differentiate student learning experiences based on membership in underrepresented groups (both historically underrepresented, as well as institutionally under-represented) creates an opportunity to “evaluate how to serve diverse populations and find ways to help all members of the institutional community succeed—not just the few who have always succeeded” (p. 69).

Chapter 4 considers the assessment of co-curricular learning often associated with student affairs operations. Author John Schuh describes an assessment model grounded in eight sequenced questions that guide practice from the initial choice of an assessment area, through the development of an assessment method and measure, and finally to strategies for reporting results. He concludes with a description of four institutions that are sites of best practice in co-curricular assessment.

Gaining buy-in for effective assessment is the major concern of Chapters 5 and 6. In Chapter 5, authors Kay Smith and Raymond Barclay make the unusual argument that educational leaders should embrace the difficulty in effectively describing and measuring student learning. Rather than seeking to “solve” the assessment problem through the implementation of high-level, cross-institutional competency or proficiency measures, the authors counter that faculty, individually and collectively, are best situated to design and implement assessment of course-level learning outcomes.

Smith and Barclay further assert that, when faculty engage in such assessment at the course and course-sequence levels, teaching improves, learning increases, and the greater outcome is deeper cognitive engagement.

Russell Osguthorpe, Bryan Bradley, and Trav Johnson, in Chapter 6, provide an illuminating case study of engaging faculty in conversations...