Nuts & Bolts July 2006 / ARCHIVE

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
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July 2006
Vol. 6 No. 11
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Editor's Note. It now looks like it'll be a while
before I can get SCI's assessment website up and
running again. In the meantime, I plan to publish the
newsletter by email and archive current issues on an
interim basis on my personal weblog at
http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... back
issues through June 2006, as well as the teaching
blog, can be accessed from my faculty page at
http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/welcome.html

* * *

Stuff happens, to paraphrase (but not quote) a popular
bumper sticker. I had planned to put Nuts & Bolts on
hiatus while I reorganized parts of SCI's assessment
website, but there's information I think I should get
out to faculty on a timely basis. So this email
message will serve as a short version of Nuts & Bolts,
SCI's monthly assessment newsletter, updating you on:
(1) reminders, tips and links relating to fall
semester syllabi, which are due in late July and early
August; and (2) developments on the federal Commission
on the Future of Higher Education, which is
deliberating radical changes in the way we do
institutional assessment.

1. Syllabi

If you've taught before at SCI and/or Benedictine
University at SCI, you're in luck. You don't have any
changes in the syllabus format to wrestle with this
year. Mary Jo Rappe of the Academic Affairs Office is
sending out detailed instructions with deadlines for
SCI's traditional and adult accelerated programs, as
well the various Benedictine modules.

If you're new, Mary Jo's instructions will show you
how to format a syllabus. And your division chair will
be able to help you work with student learning
objectives, learning outcomes and the other details of
a college syllabus.

In either event, syllabi are to be submitted this year
to your division chairs for approval.

With government and other outside stakeholders
dictating more and more of what goes on in the
classroom, our syllabi may seem more complicated than
what you remember from when you were in school. But
once you get the hang of it, it'll make sense. And
you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.

As assessment coordinator, I will be happy to offer
informal advice on how to incorporate goals,
objectives and assessment criteria into your syllabi.
I can be reached by email at pellertsen@sci.edu ...
and we have on the SCI website a 45-page PDF document
entitled "Classroom Assessment for Continuous
Improvement" that walks you through SCI's Common
Student Learning Objectives and other details.

Published in 2005, the classroom assessment guide
summarizes some basic principles of quality
improvement planning and offers tips on how to carry
it out in the classroom by means of formative
assessment. Unlike other parts of the assessment
website at the moment, it can be reached from our
homepage at www.sci.edu ... click on the Quick Link to
"Faculty and Student Websites" and then on "Assessment
Program Goals and Objectives" in the website directory
that opens. That will take you to a new page headed
"Program Goals and Objectives." Scroll down to the
heading "Classroom assessment" and click on the link
thqat says "Guide for Instructors (pdf)." It's
important to keep scrolling down, because on most
browsers you won't be able to see the classroom
assessment links at first.

If your head's swimming from all these details,
remember all of this stuff is like walking, breathing
or riding a bicycle. It's a lot easier to just *do* it
than it is to try to explain it!

2. Federal politicking

The blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, empaneled in September 2005 and due to
issue a report in September of this year, has released
a second draft report considerably less hostile to
classroom educators than its first draft. Assessment
is hardly even mentioned in this draft, at least it
isn't reflected in press coverage, but nationwide
standardized testing is still looming in the
background.

Reports the online newletter Inside Higher Ed:

"Taken together, the changes made in response to
commissioners’ criticisms of the initial report — many
of which focused on its tendency to favor
harsh-sounding and simplistic rhetoric and
recommendations over practical, well-conceived
analysis and answers — do not radically alter the
panel’s bottom line view: that higher education must
perform better in educating students and in proving
its value to the American public.

"And many if not most of the initial draft’s findings
and recommendations remain intact, a fact many college
officials will rue. The second draft, like the first,
calls for the creation of a national “unit records”
system to track students’ performance through their
academic careers and into the work place (though it
calls the proposal something else), and urges the
collection and publication of significantly more
information that colleges have either not collected
or, more often, held close to the vest.

"But in case after case, the second draft shuns the
instinct, so prevalent in the first, to “throw rocks”
at higher education, as one commissioner put it in
written comments to his colleagues. That doesn’t mean
the new report lets colleges off the hook or ignores
higher education’s real and serious problems; it just
does so in language that is more descriptive and less
inflamed."

Inside Higher Ed's story, dated July 17, can be
accessed at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/17/commission ...

The next day Inside Higher Ed's reporter Doug
Lederman, who has been following the issue all year
long, did a reaction story noting that members of the
commission were all over the map.

He quoted David Ward, president of the American
Council on Education (which represents college
presidents), as saying the second draft showed
"improvements in both tone and content" over the
first. But Ward added it "omitted the preamble that
contained the harshest rhetoric of the first draft,
and since 'these introductory comments will set the
tone for the rest of the report ... I am very anxious
to see what changes will be made in this area.'"

Lederman also quoted American Council of Trustees and
Alumni president Ann Neal as saying the second draft
dropped earlier criticism of "important curricular
issues - and their connection to the serious cultural
illiteracy that the commission recognizes." And
Richard Vedder, an adjunct scholar for a politically
conservative think tank, worried that "as we move to
maximize support within the commission [by toning down
the rhetoric], we run risk of making it more of a
pablum, inoffensive document that says relatively
little."

Lederman's headline, "Too Much Change, or Not
Enough?," catches the tone of things. His report is
available at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/18/commission

Media reaction to the draft, as with the commission's
other deliberations, ranged from muted to nonexistent.
But there were signs the political posturing isn't
quite over.

Writing on a blog titled "Phi Beta Cons: The *Right*
Take on Higher Ed" in the online edition of William
Buckley's National Review magazine, Candace de Russy
said "this draft’s regrettable dropping of focus on
declining undergraduate education should not surprise
us. There are too many higher education insiders
serving on the commission, and it is not in their
self-interest to demand serious curricular reform and
an end to grade inflation as well as to show
open-mindedness to innovative means for delivering
higher education."

She added, "Thus it’s the commission itself that ought
to be gutted and re-constituted with members with
(pardon the expression) real guts. Barring that, it is
likely that this entire exercise will in the end do
little or nothing to ameliorate higher education."

The permalink to de Russy's blog entry is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk5NmQ0Yjc3YjJjMzU2MWQ3NjI5MzVlN2U4OThmMzg=

Also reacting to the new draft in the National
Review's higher ed blog was Charles Mitchell, program
director at the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni. He quoted ACTA president Neal's July 18
statement to Higher Ed Today: "In a time of global
competition and conflict, transparency and assessments
don’t matter if the product is not worthy. ... Access
and completion rates are simply irrelevant if the
education received is incoherent and fails to
guarantee the common ground of training and outlook on
which our society depends. Yet the commission remains
silent on these critical points."

Mitchell added, I think with good reason, "There is
certainly much more to come on this story."

Mitchell's permalink is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Nzg0ZmFiNmI3NzVlMTFkNDY3YzUzYWIyMDY0NWFlNzE=

National standardized testing

In the meantime, ETS has released a report calling for
"a broad national system to better understand student
learning in two- and four-year colleges and
universities." To do that, ETS specifically recommends
"a systematic, data-driven, comprehensive approach to
measuring student learning with direct, valid and
reliable measures."

The ETS report is titled "A Culture of Evidence:
Postsecondary Assessment and Learning Outcomes." It
notes the federal commission's deliberations and
recommends that the regional accrediting associations
develop a national plan for testing on "four
dimensions of student learning":

-- workplace readiness and general skills
-- domain-specific knowledge and skills
-- soft skills such as teamwork, communications and
creativity
-- student engagement with learning.

"Colleges and universities face continued pressure to
prove their effectiveness in an increasingly difficult
fiscal environment," said Mari Pearlman, Senior Vice
President of Higher Education at ETS, in a press
release posted to the MarketWire public relations
service. "We hope this paper will further the
discussion about how our system of higher education
might respond to this challenge."

The ETS press release, which contains a link to the
report in PDF format, is available at http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=145859 ...

I hope I don't sound cynical if I note that ETS
(originally known as the Educational Testing Service)
is a leader in the standardized test business. Its
products include the SAT, the GRE, the TOEFL and high
school advanced placement tests.

-- Pete Ellertsen is chairman of SCI's assessment
committee and editor of Nuts & Bolts.