In this article, the author shares some tips for improving university-wide assessment conversations, focusing on meetings with faculty creating and doing assessment. The lessons are from a multi-year project where the author observed meetings and interviewed faculty about their involvement in university-wide assessment.

As the number of students pursuing opportunities in higher education from communities that are underrepresented and marginalized has increased over the last decade or so (National Center for Education Statistics 2022; Wilson et al. 2022), the student population of the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC) has exemplified this trend with 48%…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) James Madison University: Reflections on Sustained Excellence in Assessment (Keston H. Fulcher and Elizabeth R. H. Sanchez); (2) Editor's Notes: Assessment Excellence Abounds! (Stephen P. Hundley); (3) The Promise of an All-in-One Assessment System for Student…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Promoting Faculty Engagement in Assessment: Relatively Simple Ideas (Elizabeth E. Smith and Sarah R. Gordon); (2) Comparing Trends in Graduate Assessment: Face to Face vs. Online Learning (Lesley Page and Mike Cherry); (3) Assessing Information Literacy on a Regional…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Exact and Adjacent Inter-rater Agreement Associated with Peer Review of Teaching (Robert Koslow); (2) Examine Assessment of Student Learning outcomes as an Organizational Routine (Antigoni Papadimitriou); (3) Developing a Reliable and Valid Assessment Tool for Online…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Expanding Assessment Perspectives: The Importance of Student Leadership in Student Learning Outcomes Assessment (Abraham J. Lauer and Jamie R. Korin); (2) Empowering Faculty and Students with Assessment Data (Jane M. Souza); (3) Including Faculty in Accreditation…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Effective Leadership Assessment: A 360-Degree Process; (2) Editor's Notes: Accentuating the Positive in Our Work; (3) The Broadcast Education Association's Model Rubrics Project: Building Consensus One Rubric at a Time; (4) Building a Better…

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…

In this article, the author discusses what rubric really is. A rubric is not a technical specification nor is it a checklist for ailing student performances in need of therapy. It is the finest description of what teachers think is important for their students right now, in the service of their learning. Most important, it is a statement of their…

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…

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,…

A persistent conflict between assessment professionals and faculty members in the humanities seems to focus inevitably on resistance to the concept of interrater reliability. While humanities faculty are often willing to engage in course-embedded assessment that uses some type of scoring rubric, when the demand for agreement in scoring is…

Assessment is about measuring the outcomes of learning. How do students get from learning catalyst to product? How do educators assist them in getting there? And how can it be determined that the student is moving toward appropriate learning goals? These are particularly important questions for educators who are engaged in the development of…

The current general education program at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, which was initiated in the mid-1990s, represents a much more prescriptive curriculum than the one prior to that time, when students were allowed to choose from a wide variety of courses. In 1999, three faculty members from the Department of Languages and Literatures…

A call to engagement at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) led to significant curricular and assessment changes in the university's Department of Political Science. The university unveiled the Year of the Department (YOTD) as "an ongoing strategic initiative for orchestrating change and aligning people, systems and culture at the basic unit…