Why Assessment?

Assessment Is Needed for a Quality Learning Environment

Quality learning environments are

• “Learner-centered” – paying careful attention to the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that learners bring to the educational setting.
• “Knowledge-centered” – taking seriously the need to help students become knowledgeable by learning in ways that lead to understanding.
• “Assessment-centered” – providing opportunities for feedback and revision and what is assessed is congruent with the students’ learning goals.  Formative assessment involves the use of assessments as sources of feedback to improve teaching and learning.  Summative assessment measures what students have learned at the end of some set of learning activities.
• “Community-centered” – referring to several aspects of community, including the classroom as community, the school as a community, and the degree to which students, teachers, and administrators feel connected to the larger community of homes, business, states, the nation, and even the world.

(How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999)

Assessment Drives the Learning Paradigm College

A paradigm shift is underway: from the “instructional paradigm”, one in which

• the mission of colleges and universities is to provide instruction, to offer classes – the successful college is the one that fills classes with students and thus grows in enrollment
• teaching has a focus on
• what the student is: learning is a function of the individual differences between students – a “blame the student” theory of teaching, based on student deficit, where when students don’t learn it is due to something the students are lacking
• what the teacher does: learning is a function of teaching – a theory of teaching, based on transmission of concepts and understandings not just information, where the responsibility for effective transmission is placed on the teacher, rather than the student, thereby making it based on teacher deficit

to that of a “learning paradigm” in which the college

• emphasizes results or outcomes, rather than formal processes (curriculum, calendar, gpa)
• sees the whole, the whole experience of students, as prior to the parts, the formal instructional processes
• has a mission to produce student learning using a model of the teaching-learning process that focuses on the learner learning
• has a view of teaching in which the focus is on what the student does: getting students to understand at the level required is a matter of getting them to undertake the appropriate learning activities

• requires frequent, continual, connected, and authentic student performances
• provides consistent, continual, interactive feedback to students

• aligns all of its activities around the mission of producing student learning

(The Learning Paradigm College by Tagg 2003)

A key ingredient in learner-centered teaching is allowing students to make mistakes and learn from them.  In learner-centered environments then, we seek to understand not only what students know, but also how they know it.  Learner-centered professors coach and facilitate, intertwining teaching and assessing.  In a learner-centered environment teaching and assessing are not separate, episodic events, but rather, they are ongoing, interrelated activities focused on providing guidance for improvement.
(Learner-Centered Assessment on College Campuses by Huba and Freed 2000)