Transparent and public assessment

In a recent Inside Higher Education article, Peter McWalters, a former commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Rhode Island, who now works for the Council of Chief State School Officers, spoke about another way to assess and to validate what's happening in classrooms. Quoting from the article,

McWalters said – by making transparent the professional judgments that instructors make about their students' work. ... "There are places in the world where the assessment instrumentation of choice is exhibition-oriented professional judgment [rather than testing], but assessment keeps anchoring the judgments" so that confidence develops that they have meaning beyond an individual institution, McWalters said. "You anchor the judgment by being public with others who share the responsibility for teaching and learning – not the federal government, and not the testing companies" Colleges (and their instructors) are unlikely to be able to hide when outside accountability pressures next build on them, McWalters and others argued – so wouldn't it make sense for them to build an assessment structure that they own?

Transparent, public, not hidden. These concepts are part of the core of my approach to assessment in my classroom. My classroom is almost a glassroom. Anyone can "look in and see" what my students are being asked to accomplish.

Two of my courses are built around texts that are available for inspection on line, statistics and physical science.

I still use traditional tests in all of my courses, and these tools of learning outcome accomplishment by the students are always posted on line after administration for anyone to inspect, statistics, physical science, and ethnobotany.

I also post all of my assessment reports on line dating back into the 1990s. In more recent years these provide course level overviews of assessment in my courses, most recently including both my own internal assessments and assessments in the official college mandated format.

Two of my courses are even more transparent, with both physical science and ethnobotany including photo-documentation posted in a blog format.

The aim is transparency for any stakeholder who wants to know what I am doing in the classroom. I would argue that taken as a whole, the texts, tests, assessment, and photographic journal provide a uniquely comprehensive insight into my courses. After reviewing those, a professional in the field ought to be able to render an anchored professional judgment.

The only complication is that there exists the risk of a disconnect between my individual activities and the broader institution. To avoid that I make a best attempt to utilize the college mandated assessment formats as well as those I use to improve my own classes.

As noted in another Inside Higher Ed article, I subscribe to the concept of building from the ground up, building from the classroom learning outcomes up to higher level outcomes, and in ensuring this stack is aligned. I even presented a proposal on how to build an aligned stack back in 2006, including elements of triangulation that I know to be necessary.

Since that proposal I now view the program learning outcomes as being structurally faulty in that 2006 proposal. I now conceive that these should be built on what our students will be able to do after they graduate. My own thinking has been deeply influenced by Ruth Stiehl¹ in this regard.

¹Outcomes primer in college collection