Summer/Fall 2003
Assessment
Every five years the underlying legislation governing
federal financial aid and other programs of support for college
students must be reauthorized. In process right now, this lets
Congress and the President reconsider the fundamental premises
of federal higher education programs. This time, assessment and “productivity” are
much on the minds of many of our elected federal leaders, as
is standardized testing as a way to assess outcomes.
It is reasonable for those who pay for students
to attend college to ask what the outcomes of a collegiate education
are. But fewer and fewer of them trust that passing grades and
a college degree, even from a selective independent college like
St. Lawrence, are sufficient evidence that the intended outcomes
of a college education have been realized. As a result, we are
seeing proposals for simplistic, one-size-fits-all state and
federal assessment systems that make no sense for a liberal arts
university like St. Lawrence.
In the case of professional certification, such
as teacher certification (which we help over 60 students per
year achieve), standardized tests are one appropriate assessment
tool. When, on the other hand, a student is pursuing a liberal
arts education, the curriculum is not standard and goals are
diverse and very hard to measure. One of our goals for students
is that they come to love learning so much while at St. Lawrence
that they become life-long learners. It is not easy to estimate
whether this goal will have been achieved when they graduate.
A further complexity is that we cannot “cause” student
learning, in the way an automobile manufacturer can “cause” a
car to be built, because we need the willing partnership and
effort of students. Our responsibility is to motivate students
to learn and to facilitate learning with appropriate, well-tested,
inspiring pedagogies, but students must come prepared to take
advantage of that, and apply the effort necessary to grasp hard
material. Students attending different institutions differ greatly
in preparation and motivation.
Each higher education institution should be assessed
on how well it is achieving its own mission and goals. It makes
no sense to compare how well graduates of St. Lawrence and the
City University of New York do on a test of liberal learning
(assuming “liberal learning” has been defined in
a standard way) unless one is prepared and able to control for
the many differences in background, ability, preparation and
motivation between the students attending the two institutions.
If standardized tests are not the answer for institutions
like St. Lawrence, how can appropriate assessments be accomplished
so that stakeholders can be comfortable that we are doing a good
job? There is no easy answer, but let me tell you some of what
we do.
We work constantly to ensure that our faculty bring
the best graduate training and highest motivation to teach well
that we can find. We make sure they set clear goals for student
learning in their classes; devise and share with their students
syllabi containing readings, laboratories, exercises and performances
clearly linked to the learning goals; and evaluate carefully,
themselves (not using graduate students or teaching assistants),
using multiple assessments, what and how much students have learned.
We are especially diligent in the evaluation of student writing
all across the curriculum, the improvement of writing being a
central institutional goal. In addition, new faculty are taught
by current faculty our standards for student performance—what
should earn an “A”, for example. Here we trust the
professional judgment of our faculty, based on years of working
with each other.
But it’s hard to validate for outsiders why
we feel the trust we do. So how else do we assess? Examples include
the following, many of whose results we benchmark against those
of peer institutions nationally:
- Every course taught at St. Lawrence is evaluated by students,
First-Year Program courses in greater detail. These results
are used in faculty tenure and promotion decisions and in
program assessments.
- Annually, we administer several surveys to our students
seeking their assessments of institutional performance and
how much they believe they’ve learned.
- We have twice administered the National Survey of Student
Engagement (NSSE) to a large sample of students in all class
years. Respondents told us how frequently they experienced
in their St. Lawrence classes approaches to teaching and
learning that research shows produce the greatest learning.
When we compared the results with those from comparable liberal
arts colleges, and from institutions of many other kinds,
St. Lawrence stacked up really well.
- We believe that student retention—the percentage
of incoming students who graduate from an institution—is
an important measure of both the level of preparation of
incoming students (better prepared students are more likely
to graduate) and how satisfied students are with their college
choice (more satisfied students are more likely to stay and
graduate).
- We also believe that there is a rough justice in the admissions
marketplace—if we perform better as an institution,
current students and their parents will share their sense
of our performance with prospective students and parents.
Improving or deteriorating admissions results tell an important
tale of institutional performance.
None of these strategies by itself is sufficient,
and I have chosen to highlight only a few. Multiple, interrelated
assessments are necessary. Also necessary is a firm institutional
commitment to look at our performance without rose-colored glasses,
and to use the assessment information we have to inform the kind
of self-reflection that leads to continuous quality improvement.
Some in Congress (I hope not a majority) would
prefer to summarize St. Lawrence’s performance using a
single measure from a standardized test. I believe that would
be a serious mistake.
