Advancing Assessment for Student Success

“A stark contrast to assessment processes that are aimed primarily at demonstrating fulfillment of externally established compliance standards, the authors’ learner-centered assessment process is aimed primarily at promoting individual students’ progress toward achieving course-, program-, and institution-level learning outcomes along their educational pathways, as well as engaging students in assuming agency for their learning. Written by seasoned educators who share a commitment to integrating assessment into the processes of teaching and learning that stretch across students’ studies, authors Amy Driscoll, Swarup Wood, Dan Shapiro, and Nelson Gaff provide readers principles, practices, processes, strategies, and campus scenarios and case studies that deepen and broaden a shared commitment to all learners’ success across the broad institutional system that contributes to their learning.

Most important, this book achieves what, I believe, has always been our challenge: to humanize assessment—to uncover the challenges our individual students face and then develop or identify interventions, strategies, or practices to assist each student persist and achieve along the trajectory of that individual’s educational pathways. Students represented in numbers or percentages on assessment reports do not humanize them nor do quantified data or band aid solutions reflect effective educators’ efforts to promote student success. I thus also call upon accreditors and other reporting entities focused on assuring our institutions advance all students to attain equitable outcomes to read this book to inform future assessment reporting guidelines or standards that provide institutions opportunities to document the realities that underlie their ongoing efforts to prepare current and future students who reflect our national demographics and who will shape our future.  

This book should speak to and offer inspiration to so many in higher education, from faculty to faculty developers, student affairs professionals, and administrators.”

From the Foreword by Peggy L. Maki - Education Consultant Specializing in Assessing Student Learning

"Driscoll and her coauthors clearly get the vital need to prepare a cadre of assessment professionals for every sector of higher education, including for community colleges. Faculty know the old saying, “What gets assessed gets learned.” These authors know that how it gets assessed determines how it is learned. Accreditors will particularly appreciate these practical insights since sound, integrated assessment practices are foundational when an institution sets out to demonstrate mission accomplishment and program improvement."

Richard Winn, President (Retired) Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges - Western Association of Schools and Colleges

Foreword
Introduction

1) Advancing Assessment: Currents of Movement, Eddies, and New Paths—Amy Driscoll
2) Equity in Assessment: Supports for all Students—Amy Driscoll
3) Learning Outcomes: Engaging Students, Staff, and Faculty—Swarup Wood
4) Aligned and Coherent Assessment, Pedagogy, and Curriculum: Connections for Student Success—Amy Driscoll
5) Understanding and Supporting Achievement: Improving Assignment Prompts and Rubrics—Nelson Graff
6) Using Evidence of Student Achievement: Advancing Student Success—Amy Driscoll
7) Advancing Reflection: Fostering Conversations That Improve Student Success—Dan Shapiro
8) Advancing Communication: Sharing Stories That Improve Student Success—Dan Shapiro

About the Authors
Index

Amy Driscoll

Amy Driscoll retired from California State University, Monterey Bay as the founding Director of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment and from Portland State University as Director of Community/University Partnerships. For the last 11 years, she has coordinated and taught in the Assessment Leadership Academy, a year-long program for faculty and administrators, and consulted nationally and internationally. She co-authored Developing Outcomes-based Assessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction with Swarup Wood in 2007.

Swarup Wood

Swarup Wood is Professor of Chemistry and currently serves as Interim Director of General Education and Coordinator of First Year Seminar at California State University Monterey Bay where he has worked since 1997. He co-authored Developing Outcomes-based Assessment for Learner-centered Education: A Faculty Introduction with Amy Driscoll in 2007.

Dan Shapiro

Dan Shapiro currently serves as the Interim Associate Vice President for Academic Programs and Dean of University College and Graduate Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). He has worked at CSUMB since 1997, beginning as a lecturer and a faculty associate in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (TLA)--when Amy was the director. He started serving as director of TLA in 2014. He is a graduate of the WSCUC Assessment Leadership Academy (ALA, Cohort VII) and coordinates the ALA professional mentoring program.

Nelson Graff

Nelson Graff currently serves as Professor and Director of Communication Across the Disciplines, teaching first-year reading/writing and supporting faculty around CSUMB in teaching reading and writing in their classes. Before that, he was an associate professor of English Education at San Francisco State University, preparing future secondary English teachers.