We can ensure ongoing improvement by...

knowing how well students are learning. Evaluation of what individual students learn in courses has always been part of teaching. Faculty members review work and assign a grade. Traditional evaluation of this type is generally done well and conscientiously. Student dissatisfaction tends to arise when tests seem unrelated to the work of the course, either in content or testing style.

Much less often, however, do professors gather information about competencies that grow during an entire undergraduate career or about collective student performance (by aggregating individual results). While most colleges, for example, say that one of their goals is developing students' abilities in critical thinking, only a few determine how well the student body as a whole analyzes or synthesizes as seniors, much less as entering first-year students. Outsiders who find college graduates unprepared for solving problems in the workplace question whether the colleges are successfully educating their students to think; the colleges have difficulty proving their success.

Assessment is part and parcel of the teaching/learning process. Explicit goals—written and widely shared—specifying what students are expected to know, form the basis for assessment. Learning goals establish the foundation for aligning curricula, teaching, and assessment.

In a continuous manner, colleges should want to make sure that students are learning. Informal assessments conducted during a course (formative assessment) can help a teacher change direction in mid-stream if it appears that students have not understood well enough. More formal evaluation at the end (summative assessment) can feed back into shaping the course design itself. The more closely assessment methods or testing reflect classroom activities, the better they will point up strengths or weaknesses. For example, students expected to critically evaluate complex issues on a final exam need to be asked throughout the course to practice analysis.

Assessments at levels broader than the individual classroom require careful curricular planning. If a college expects all seniors to write convincingly as well as correctly, students will need to write for many courses, throughout the curriculum, over all their years of attendance. Since college educational aims comprehend many abilities that cut across individual courses, senior year assessments could ideally demonstrate skill in integrating a number of them. Portfolios of student work, including web-based portfolios, offer a potentially valuable assessment mechanism.

So, too, do senior projects. To become a truly effective tool, a portfolio serves as more than a collection of student work, interesting as that may be; an evaluation of the learning demonstrated finds its way back into improved programs and teaching. As an example, if a sampling of seniors' portfolios indicated only an introductory ability to formulate hypotheses and test them, the faculty responsible would review where and how in the curriculum this aspect of critical thinking could be strengthened.

When taken seriously, assessment shapes curricula and instructional practice. The business community axiom that "what gets measured, gets done" holds true in education as well. If limited interpretations of assessment lead to external standardized tests that primarily evaluate the low-level skills of factual recall, classroom activities will focus on facts, rather than on understanding. A more nuanced interpretation of assessment recognizes that locally devised mechanisms, often embedded in coursework, can provide more relevant information. An "authentic assignment," similar to what an expert in the field might face, can serve to assess multiple types of learning, and do so at sophisticated levels. If, for example, students are expected to be learning about the history of civil rights, a multiple-choice test will show if they know the major issues, names of activists, and important dates. An assignment asking them to design a voter registration drive given a set of historical constraints could probe for a much deeper understanding of racial and ethnic cultures, while also assessing writing and analytical ability.

In the culture of the New Academy—a culture of evidence⁶⁰—assessment is a necessary and integral part of greater student achievement. It becomes predominantly a tool for improvement: to improve learning, teaching, and the curriculum. Learning-centered assessment can be linked to courses and allow professors to answer for themselves the important questions of what, how much, and how well their students are learning. Assessment need not remain the threatening concept it often now seems to faculty members, identified with external control and infringement on academic freedom.

Assessment for improvement can have the added benefit of showing external stakeholders the academy's success in doing its job: educating students. Explicit learning goals and transparent assessment results could go a long way toward satisfying the demands for accountability and improved learning that are arising in many states.

Promoting Greater Expectations on Campus: Starting Down the Path 1. Encourage broad conversations about greater expectations and learning- centered, twenty-first century liberal education; listen to many voices. 2. Develop a clear statement of functional goals for student learning, from entrance through graduation, and share those goals publicly (including with high schools). 3. Review strategic plans and resource allocation decisions for the centrality of learning within the mission of the institution. 4. Provide faculty and staff development about teaching, curriculum, assessment, collective responsibility, and collaborative leadership. 5. Begin to review the curriculum to ensure that its design supports student progress toward the goals. 6. Plan out the next five steps.