This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Do Good Assessment Practices Measure Up to the Principles of Assessment?; (2) Healthy Assessment: What Nursing Schools Can Teach Us about Effective Assessment of Student Learning; (3) Development of a National Survey for Secondary Mathematics Teacher Education…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) "Just Right" Outcomes Assessment: A Fable for Higher Education (Catherine M. Wehlburg); (2) Editor's Notes: Helping Faculty Members Learn (Linda Suskie); (3) Focus on the Bottom-Line: Assessing Business Writing (Michael Cherry and George Klemic); (4)…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Mission Accomplished! The Development of a Competence-based E-portfolio Assessment Model (Shelley Schuurman, Scott Berlin, Jamie Langlois, and Julie Guevara); (2) The Third Rail of Assessment--Dangerous but Powerful (Dale L. Mort); (3) Video Killed the Radio…

Any assessment primer cautions that course grades are not ordinarily considered outcomes assessments. The rationale for excluding grades as an assessment mechanism uses the following logic: because grades measure a variety of learning outcomes and probably take into account factors like attendance that have nothing to do with evidence of learning,…

At Oklahoma State University (OSU), faculty have defined expectations for students' learning of knowledge, skills, and attitudes about diversity, and have implemented a process to assess students' achievement of the diversity learning goal. As was done for other general education learning goals such as written communication ability and critical…

The assessment movement in higher education is now into its fourth decade. Although real and worthy progress is certainly evident to those who have been in the teaching profession at least that long, the changes remain largely superficial. Well-intentioned mandates have received respectful accommodation. At the institutional level, teachers have…

The Academic Skills Inventory (Kruger and Zechmeister, 2001) was developed at Loyola University of Chicago and originally designed for use with psychology majors. It was later extended for use in a variety of academic programs. The Academic Skills Inventory (ASI) assesses student self-reports of behaviors in 10 skill areas: (1) written and oral…

In November 2004, Calvin College was reviewed for reaccreditation by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. In its final report, the review team, as it has in evaluating many other colleges, faulted Calvin for insufficient progress in assessment, made some recommendations, and asked for a…

The purpose of this article is to describe a procedure that has been used successfully to evaluate the critical thinking (CT) abilities of a population of undergraduates having limited proficiency in the English language. The results of this study demonstrate that it is possible to obtain reliable evaluations of CT skills in undergraduates who…

It is critical to a successful assessment process that faculty play an active role in the development and administration of assessment programs. That process requires a good deal of consensus among faculty members. Once outcomes and an instrument have been decided on and data collected, the faculty must also agree on a course of action to improve…

This article presents the author's critique of R. Stephen RiCharde's argument in his essay on the humanities and interrater reliability in the July-August 2008 issue of "Assessment Update." RiCharde suggests that the humanities' historical commitment to a dialectical pedagogy, a "nonlinear" process that values disagreement and debate, is at odds…

This article presents the author's response to Arend Flick. The author states that Flick is correct that the issue of rubrics is broader than interrater reliability, though it is the assessment practitioner's primary armament against what the author has heard dubbed "refried bean counting" (insinuating that assessment statistics are not just bean…

There are many ways to approach the evaluation of student learning. Portfolios, as collections of student work, are an increasingly popular assessment strategy, especially in the United States. Portfolios provide an exceptionally comprehensive picture of student learning. However, this assessment method requires extra effort to plan, to evaluate,…

This article focuses on the assessment system at Western Governors University from the perspective of candidate assessment and performance and on the way in which this system is presented to the Board of Examiners of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Central to a successful review by the NCATE Board of Examiners…

This article describes the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a postsecondary assessment tool designed to evaluate the "value-added" component of institutional contributions to student learning outcomes. Developed by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), the instrument ostensibly focuses on the contributions of general education coursework…