Higher Education Evaluation, Assessment, and Faculty Engagement

In: New directions for evaluation: a publication of the American Evaluation Association, Band 2016, Heft 151, S. 11-20

Abstract

AbstractEvaluative practice has a long and deep history in higher education. It has been a persistent part of instructional practice and curriculum, intricately entwined with scholarly efforts to address teaching and learning. From public policy and oversight perspectives, the questions of value and worth have often focused on inputs—faculty credentials, facilities, etc.—as well as fiscal responsibility. But in the last 30 years, attention has turned to student learning as a critical outcome and the assessment of learning as a principal endeavor. The developments in higher education assessment have involved increasingly sophisticated psychometric approaches to measurement as well as more teacherly orientations to the implementation of educational assessments within the individual contexts—and intentions—of colleges and universities. In this chapter, we introduce some of the issues in the field and argue that evaluation has a unique history that is committed to systematically bringing evidence of program outcomes and processes into the discourse of educators—administrators, faculty, and staff—as they examine and build on their own operations. We briefly review the current context and challenges and support increased evaluator–faculty collaboration. We make a case for how the analysis of evaluation practices in higher education is both a means to increasing expertise in those applications and to thinking about evaluation practices across developing and complex institutions.