Refining an Approach to Assessment for Learning Improvement

Assessment of student learning is typically undertaken with at least two goals in mind, accountability and improvement. This dichotomy of purpose has dogged assessment from the outset (Ewell, 2009) and contributed to conflicted or incomplete ends. As Banta and Palomba (2015) concluded, assessment undertaken primarily to comply with accountability demands does not usually result in campus improvements. Although the accountability aim of assessment is self-evident, the improvement goal is more elusive. What sort of improvement does assessment facilitate? Does any action on assessment results qualify as achieving the improvement goal? More to the point, do we have good evidence of learning improvements from assessment? It is well established that the greatest challenge in the assessment cycle is in “closing the loop,” or taking action on assessment results and then measuring the difference on the intended outcome (Banta & Blaich, 2011; Kuh, et al., 2015). Moreover, opinion pieces have questioned whether assessment activities make any difference to student learning at all (e.g., Gilbert, 2018).