Assessing assessment

From a commentary in today's Chronicle of Higher Education:

I have long worried that most of us (certainly me) have thought of undergraduate education primarily in terms of our own course offerings. If we think beyond our personal teaching obligations, for the most part we think no farther than the responsibility of our department for undergraduate instruction -- although these days it is all too common for faculty members to restrict their teaching and their energy almost completely to the sphere of their own research interests. A much smaller number of us, I would guess, are also concerned with the overall education of our students, and participate in some sort of general education, working especially with underclass students.

Most colleges have general education programs or distribution plans to compel students to be exposed to some learning outside their major field. But the underlying reality is that the curriculum is primarily considered a collection (not usually a sequence) of discrete "courses." The main organizing conception of the curriculum (for upperclass students) is that of the "major," but most colleges do not have a theory about how the major relates to their four-year learning goals.

The sad fact is that even after a century of utilizing this form of undergraduate education, we have little systematic knowledge of whether it works, how well it works -- or, more important, whether alternative approaches (and there are many in play across the country) might work better. We are not agreed on what it means "to work". Most colleges do not have explicit cognitive goals either in our majors or for the college experience as a whole? Until we can state precisely what our educational goals are, it will not be possible to assess our success in meeting them.

And now, for the rest of the story...