LibLog

March 1, 2010

The Benefits of Collaboration for Engagement in Assessment
By Jo Beld, St. Olaf College

Countless sessions at January’s CHEA conference and the AAC&U annual meeting were devoted to great work on assessing student learning. One of those sessions—at AAC&U—was led by the good folks at the National Survey of Student Engagement. It got me thinking about the parallels between student engagement in learning, and faculty and staff engagement in assessment. Our NSSE colleagues tell us that students learn best when they are challenged, when they engage in active and collaborative learning; when they interact frequently with faculty; when they take advantage of enriching educational experiences; and when they are supported. It dawned on me that these same five benchmarks are associated with robust practices in assessment—which is, after all, essentially a giant exercise in organizational learning. For assessment to grow and thrive, faculty and staff need to be challenged, to create and collaborate; to communicate; to be coached, and to be celebrated.

Of all these benchmarks of effective assessment practice, the one that I believe has my benefited my institution the most is collaboration. We have been involved in a terrific array of partnerships both within and beyond St. Olaf, and each and every one of them bears some responsibility for the award we recently received from CHEA for “institutional progress in student learning outcomes.” First, we have benefited tremendously from inter-institutional collaboration. Several years of grant support from the Teagle Foundation, and from the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, have enabled assessment partnerships with Carleton, Macalester, and Grinnell Colleges that have helped us invent, implement, interrogate, and institutionalize attention to evidence of student learning. One of our projects has now grown to include 50 other liberal arts institutions. Other invaluable opportunities for “active and collaborative learning” about assessment have been provided by AAC&U; for example, our current approach to assessing General Education was inspired by what we heard from other schools during a round-table discussion at an AAC&U Network conference. As we said about these inter-institutional collaborations in our most recent report to the Higher Learning Commission, “Together we have exchanged—and acted on—ideas for designing assessment instruments, recruiting students to participate in assessment projects, conducting further analysis of our findings, identifying appropriate audiences for assessment results, presenting findings in ways that engage our audiences, and making meaning out of the results. We have supported each other in the inevitable difficult moments that attend innovation and organizational learning, and we have celebrated one another’s successes as well. Our inter-institutional assessment projects have built interpersonal and inter-institutional bridges in ways we never could have imagined.”

Second, our assessment efforts have benefited from intra-institutional collaboration involving not only faculty, but also staff and students. For example, last summer, we assembled a faculty-staff-student team to develop a new assessment instrument focused on the essential learning outcomes of a college education, as articulated in AAC&U’s LEAP initiative, which we administered to incoming first-years during their fall orientation week, and which we’re about to administer to graduating seniors as well. The team was a great illustration of the power of intra-institutional partnership; it included two members of our faculty assessment subcommittee (a philosopher and a chemist); myself (a political scientist); the College Registrar (a professor of French); the Associate Dean for First-Year Students; the faculty Director of Writing; the staff Director of Institutional Research; our staff Senior Research Analyst; our staff office coordinator (who also happens to be a recent graduate); the president of our student government association; and a student research assistant. Thanks to their work, we’ve gained valuable insight into how our incoming students conceptualize key outcomes such as “critical thinking,” “effective writing,” and “global perspective,” and what they think they need to do to develop those outcomes. We learned about their priorities for college learning and their prior experiences (or lack thereof) in high school. We discovered that they are much more likely to look inward rather than outward in tracking their progress as learners, relying on their own sense of ease and engagement with the subject matter rather than on extrinsic indicators like grades or comments on papers. We found out what they were most worried about and what they were most looking forward to as they anticipated their first year of college. Because our “Essential Learning Outcomes Assessment” questionnaire resulted from a faculty-staff-student collaboration, it reflected the “whole person” that we aim to educate—and many of the students told us they found it a welcome opportunity to remember why they had come to college in the first place. We can hardly wait to see what we learn from our seniors!

These are just a few of the ways in which “active and collaborative learning” among St. Olaf faculty, staff, and students—in the company of many colleagues at other institutions—have contributed to the assessment practices highlighted in the NSSE presentation and affirmed by our CHEA award. We are grateful for these partnerships in support of the learning that all our students need and deserve. If you make friends, you can assess; if you assess, you’ll make friends!

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