Document View

Mitchell reviews Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution by Peggy Maki.

Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution. Peggy Maki Sterling, VA: Stylus and Washington, DC: American Association of Higher Education, 2004, 204 pages, $24.95 (softcover)

In 1994, The Student Learning Imperative claimed "the enhancement of student learning and personal development [as] the primary goal of student affairs programs and services" (American College Personnel Association, 1994). A decade later, while student affairs articulated the imperative, academic affairs perhaps has more visibly actualized it, goaded if not fomented by the assessment imperative of accrediting bodies. By comparison, student affairs often seems to have relegated itself to "proxy measures" (Parshall & Spencer, 2000) such as involvement, retention, amount of faculty-student interaction, academic success (often measured in GPA), amount of alcohol use, and campus climate and various other means rather than ends (Carver, 2000). While these attributes are unassailably important in students' abilities to reach their academic and personal goals, they are secondary to the central question: Did students learn what we intended them to learn?

Student affairs must urgently, clearly and sustainably define its learning objectives/outcomes and make student learning and its assessment a top priority if the profession is to remain viable. To do otherwise will relegate student affairs to the role of academic handmaiden, ever assisting, never leading, supporting the academic mission of the institution but on its backstage periphery. Declining federal and state support for higher education has led to the outsourcing if not elimination of many support functions. In a gathering storm of high stakes, if the profession does not move to the center in the articulation, intentional actualization and assessment of student learning outcomes, it will cease to exist. We must define, deliver, and assess student learning rather than the accoutrements of our handmaidenship.

Assessing for Learning offers student affairs professionals the opportunity to join their faculty colleagues center stage, anchoring their shared mission and actions within the central focus of the academy. While written primarily for a faculty audience, the book is peppered with references not only to student affairs services but also to its literature. In chapters 1 ("Developing a Collective Institutional Commitment") and 2 ("Beginning With Dialogue About Teaching and Learning"), Maki sets the conceptual stage within which student affairs must situate itself at any given institution. The section in chapter 2 on maps (also well-represented in Maki, 2004b) particularly may help student affairs professionals translate institutional and divisional mission statements into intended learning outcomes.

Of even greater pragmatic benefit to student affairs professionals will be the book's clear examples of learning outcomes (chapter 3). Though Maki's examples are from courses and curricula, student affairs professionals can use these examples (as well as those offered in Diamond, 1998; Huba & Freed, 2000) to craft learning objectives/learning outcomes as the knowledge and skills that

student affairs professionals intend for students to learn instead of "what just happens along the way if the conditions are right." Rather than the learning objective of "using modern engineering tools for the desired solution" in one of Maki's examples (p. 65), the intentionally, sequentially, and planfully fomented areas of skill and knowledge articulated by student affairs professionals for students might include communicating effectively with people different from themselves, making good decisions, and building relationships (Spencer, 2000; see also Palomba & Banta, 1999) to name just several that lie "near and dear" to the heart of the student affairs profession. In the framework of faculty and student affairs collaboration on assessment, Kuh and Banta (2000) suggested that the use of both process indicators and outcomes indicators characterized successful collaborative assessment efforts. Kuh, Gonyea, and Rodriguez (2002) note that

Student development is both a process and a holistic set of desired outcomes. . . . As a process, student development is the unfolding of human potential toward increasingly complicated and refined levels of functioning. As a set of outcomes, [emphasis added] student development encompasses a host of desirable skills, knowledge, competencies, beliefs, and attitudes students are supposed to cultivate during college. These include (a) complex cognitive skills such as reflection and critical thinking, (b) an ability to apply knowledge to practical problems encountered in one's vocation, family or other areas of life, (c) an understanding and appreciation of human differences, (d) practical competencies such as decision making, conflict resolution, and teamwork, and (e) a coherent integrated sense of identity, self-esteem, confidence integrity aesthetic sensibilities, spirituality and civic responsibility, (p. 101)

Using Maki's book, student affairs professionals would do well to model at least some of their efforts after the manner in which the assessment of learning outcomes is unfolding in academic affairs. In academic affairs, student learning unfolds through a series of courses and required experiences, a defined manner that seems enviably easy by comparison. For student affairs, student learning in intentional outcomes can unfold across the cocurricular environment: the residence hall, the dining hall, student organizations and the like, a far more varied landscape to be sure but one no less deserving of intentional goals and the measurement/assessment of the degree to which these goals are being met.

Maki's chapter 4, "Identifying or Designing Tasks to Assess the Dimensions of Learning," offers a wealth of ideas about how student affairs professionals, translating the ideas from academic affairs, might design assessments that provide both student and professional alike with feedback on the degree to which intentional learning objectives have been met. Frightened by the assessment imperatives around them, student affairs professionals sometimes reach in desperation for "simple measures" (Love & Estanek, 2004, p. 105) rather than investigating the rich possibilities of authentic assessment (Darling-Hammond, Ancess, & Falk, 1995), rubrics (Stevens & Levi, 2004) or other assessment methods that are part of the "multiple assessment measures" approach (Maki, 2002) advocated in good assessment practice. The use of rubrics seems particularly well-suited for assessing student development along many of the theoretical dimensions outlined by Evans, Forney, and Guido-DiBrioto (1998).

Maki offers a wealth of assessment ideas beyond "simple measures." And as she and so many other authors note, the assessment method itself is dictated in part by the intended learning outcome, again a clarion call for clarity in these intended outcomes. What do we want our students to know and be able to do? What shall we do to teach or otherwise impart these intended objectives? How shall students show that they have acquired what we intended? How shall we use these results to further enrich students' learning and our efforts in this pursuit?

Maki's chapter 5 provides guidance on the important measurement credibility matters of norm and criterion referencing, scoring rubrics, and interrater reliability. Student affairs professionals, sometimes fearful that the only credible test is a standardized test, should read this chapter in detail. While standardized measurements can be an important thread in the fabric of assessing student learning outcomes, there are additional threads to consider and knowledgeably use beyond the "Tests and Measurements" type textbook so often gathering dust on the shelves of professionals some years away from formal graduate training.

True to its subtitle of "Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution," Maki's chapters 6 and 7 provide the reader with ways to connect ongoing, embedded assessment with student learning to hone and deepen the learning for both student and professional. Chapter 7, the final section, describes the manner in which assessment can become "a core institutional process of inquiry over time", as its title states, rather than isolated episodes of knee-jerk accountability. The picture Maki paints is dynamic and insightful.

It is essential that student affairs-the profession as a whole and the people within it-aggressively and knowledgeably move into the central dialogue of student learning outcomes. Maki describes the efforts already underway and offers a ticket through which the student affairs profession might more clearly enter the arena. Get your game on, student affairs!