Assessments

What is Assessment?

Over the past few decades, state and federal policy makers and the public have asked higher education to provide a culture of evidence to account for student learning. This includes instruction not only of cognitive abilities, but also personal and social responsibility skills. Learning experiences should be integrated with practices both in and out of the classroom building and reinforcing one another. Today’s media saturated students are increasingly willing to live and operate within incomplete, fragmented, and contradictory frames of reference. When students see connections between these experiences their education can potentially be profounder and more lasting.

The figure below summarizes how the process of assessment is a continuous cycle, allowing for new approaches as the cycle repeats itself. The process, if implemented correctly, can inform us about where we want students to be at the end of a course, a program, or when they graduate from Merced College, and how will we know if they got there.

Barr and Tagg in their article “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education” pose the idea that schools provide instruction when they should produce learning.  They compare the trends and the focus at colleges  looking at a variety of key indices listed below.   The new paradigm shifts the emphasis to focus on student outcomes.   Rather than awarding a degree based on the accumulated time spent in courses, students are empowered to demonstrate they have learned the knowledge and skills to earn the degree or certificate.