Nuts & Bolts Sept. 2006 ARCHIVE

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
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September 2006
Vol. 7 No. 2
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Editor's Note. Since I am still unable to post to
SCI's assessment website, I am publishing the
newsletter by email and archiving it in interim on my
personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... if
representatives of the North Central Association, the
Illinois Board of Higher Education or other outside
stakeholders wish to see SCI's annual Assessment
Report for 2005-2006 or other current information
regarding our assessment program, please direct them
to my personal blog. -- Pete Ellertsen, assessment
chair

* * *

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT WORKSHOP

September's issue of Nuts & Bolts is coming out a day
early (Aug. 31) to catch faculty members before the
last minute leading up to the Labor Day weekend. (OK,
OK, it's the *next* to last minute.) That's to give
you more time to plan on attending one of the workshop
sessions on Classroom Assessment Techniques we'll
conduct in the next couple of weeks.

The workshop, in the Resource Center on the
lower level of SCI's Becker Library, will be offered
at three times:

(1) Thursday, Sept. 7, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.;
(2) Monday, Sept. 11, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.; and
(3) Tuesday, Sept. 12, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Attendance is voluntary, and all interested SCI and
Benedictine University faculty are welcome. We'll talk
about how to find assessment techniques that are
appropriate to the learning goals and objectives in
our syllabi, and I'll show interested instructors some
aids on the World Wide Web that I've found helpful. I
expect the sessions will be small and informal.

The workshop would be especially valuable for new
instructors who may not have experience with CATs (as
classroom assessment techniques are called), but
seasoned instructors are welcome to exchange ideas and
share their experience and insights as well.

MORE POLITICS

In a move that surprised many, U.S. Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings has announced four
hearings nationwide on whether recommendations of the
federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education
"can be put in place through federal regulation"
through a procedure known as the negotiated
rule-making process. One area up for review, according
to an Aug. 18 announcement in the Federal Register, is
accreditation.

No one in higher education is able to say exactly what
the Department wants to do about accreditation,
according to Doug Lederman of the online newsletter
Inside Higher Ed:

"The Spellings commission’s report takes broad shots
at the perceived ineffectiveness and dysfunction of
the system of voluntary regional and national
accreditation, but offers relatively few firm
proposals for transforming it. So while there are no
obvious changes in accreditation that might emerge
from regulatory negotiations, the department could see
itself as having broad latitude to impose new
requirements on accreditors and, in turn, on colleges,
some observers speculate."

While staff-written working papers presented to the
commission in the spring and early drafts of its
report were quite acrimonious about accreditation,
along with other perceived failures in higher ed, the
hostile tone had largely dropped out of the final
draft, which was approved early in August. With the
hostility, most references to accreditation were also
backburnered.

In an article in the current issue of The Chronicle of
Higher Education, Kelly Field catches the uncertainty
that has greeted the commission's latest regulatory
tack. Field also ties the issue to President Bush's
larger political agenda:

"... some college lobbyists still wondered why an
administration that had shown little interest in
higher education during its first term was suddenly so
concerned with its future. Some speculated that the
administration was trying to divert attention from its
unpopular No Child Left Behind Act, the 2002 law that
imposed testing on the nation's elementary and
secondary schools; others suspected that it was
seeking to extend that law's reach into the college
classroom.

"To the suspicious, the secretary's choice of a
commission chairman seemed proof of a plot to
institute standardized testing at colleges. Charles
Miller, a millionaire investor and close friend of
both Ms. Spellings and President Bush, was best known
for devising a Texas public-school accountability
system that became the model for No Child Left Behind.
He was also associated with accountability testing at
the University of Texas System, where he led the Board
of Regents from 2001 to 2004."

Field adds:

"The swiftness of the secretary's response took some
college lobbyists by surprise. They said the
administration's announcement, which appeared in the
August 18 edition of the Federal Register, signaled
that the secretary did not want to lose any momentum
for change created by the commission's deliberations.

"So far, the administration has given few clues about
which recommendations it might consider as part of the
negotiated rule making — a process by which federal
agencies work with affected parties as regulations are
drafted."

All of this may well affect us at SCI and Benedictine,
because assessment is a politically driven process and
its political underpinnings may be changing.

Hearings will be held in California, Florida,
Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The Chicago hearing
will be Oct. 19 at Loyola University.

Works Cited

Field, Kelly. "Uncertainty Greets Report on Colleges
by U.S. Panel." Chronicle of Higher Education Sept. 1,
2006. http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i02/02a00101.htm

Lederman, Doug. "Regulatory Activism?" Inside Higher
Ed Aug. 21, 2006.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/21/regs

Nassirian, Barmak. "U.S. Department of Education
Formally Plans for 'Negotiated Rulemaking'." AACRAO
Transcript [American Association of Collegeate
Registrars and Admissions Officers] Aug. 30, 2006. http://www.aacrao.org/transcript/index.cfm?fuseaction=show_view&doc_id=3294