American Association for Higher Education

9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning

   1. *The assessment of student learning begins with educational
      values. *Assessment is not an end in itself but a vehicle for
      educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with
      and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for
      students and strive to help them achieve. Educational values
      should drive not only /what/ we choose to assess but also /how/ we
      do so. Where questions about educational mission and values are
      skipped over, assessment threatens to be an exercise in measuring
      what's easy, rather than a process of improving what we really
      care about.
   2. *Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of
      learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in
      performance over time. *Learning is a complex process. It entails
      not only what students know but what they can do with what they
      know; it involves not only knowledge and abilities but values,
      attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success
      and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect
      these understandings by employing a diverse array of methods,
      including those that call for actual performance, using them over
      time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of
      integration. Such an approach aims for a more complete and
      accurate picture of learning, and therefore firmer bases for
      improving our students' educational experience.
   3. *Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have
      clear, explicitly stated purposes.* Assessment is a goal-oriented
      process. It entails comparing educational performance with
      educational purposes and expectations -- those derived from the
      institution's mission, from faculty intentions in program and
      course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals. Where
      program purposes lack specificity or agreement, assessment as a
      process pushes a campus toward clarity about where to aim and what
      standards to apply; assessment also prompts attention to where and
      how program goals will be taught and learned. Clear, shared,
      implementable goals are the cornerstone for assessment that is
      focused and useful.
   4. *Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to
      the experiences that lead to those outcomes.* Information about
      outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up" matters
      greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student
      experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and
      kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes.
      Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under
      what conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve
      the whole of their learning. 
   5. *Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic.*
      Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though
      isolated, "one-shot" assessment can be better than none,
      improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked
      series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking
      the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it
      may mean collecting the same examples of student performance or
      using the same instrument semester after semester. The point is to
      monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continous
      improvement. Along the way, the assessment process itself should
      be evaluated and refined in light of emerging insights.
   6. *Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from
      across the educational community are involved.* Student learning
      is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of
      enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may
      start small, the aim over time is to involve people from across
      the educational community. Faculty play an especially important
      role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without
      participation by student-affairs educators, librarians,
      administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve
      individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees,
      employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of appropriate
      aims and standards for learning. Thus understood, assessment is
      not a task for small groups of experts but a collaborative
      activity; its aim is wider, better-informed attention to student
      learning by all parties with a stake in its improvement.
   7. *Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use
      and illuminates questions that people really care about.
      *Assessment recognizes the value of information in the process of
      improvement. But to be useful, information must be connected to
      issues or questions that people really care about. This implies
      assessment approaches that produce evidence that relevant parties
      will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions that
      need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the
      information will be used, and by whom. The point of assessment is
      not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that
      starts with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them
      in the gathering and interpreting of data, and that informs and
      helps guide continous improvement.
   8. *Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part
      of a larger set of conditions that promote change.* Assessment
      alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses
      where the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and
      worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational
      performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving
      the quality of undergraduate education is central to the
      institution's planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions. On
      such campuses, information about learning outcomes is seen as an
      integral part of decision making, and avidly sought.
   9. *Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students
      and to the public.* There is a compelling public stake in
      education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publics
      that support or depend on us to provide information about the ways
      in which our students meet goals and expectations. But that
      responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our
      deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is
      to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a
      corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement.

*Authors:* Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine
El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M.
McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran;
Barbara D. Wright

This document was developed under the auspices of the AAHE Assessment
Forum with support from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary
Education with additional support for publication and dissemination from
the Exxon Education Foundation. Copies may be made without restriction.