When I tell people that assessment (writing assessment, specifically) was a research focus of mine in graduate school and a professional focus, I get strange looks. The process tedious. Getting data from faculty and administrator stakeholders can be a challenge. The result of assessment is typically a report that goes largely unread if a program or initiative is working as intended—which means that the work typically has no result unless it bears bad news.
With that in mind, the strange looks make sense, but they don’t deter me from the reason I wanted to get involved with academic assessment in the first place: assessment is often viewed as quality control, but it’s really the best window in to how our students are actually learning.
Conceptual Change and Proactive Design
My dissertation used conceptual change theory as the primary lens for understanding how college students learned the subject matter and discursive features of their discipline. Much of the current literature in conceptual change focuses on pivotal events that lead to restructuring or accommodation of knowledge, where a learner stops accumulating bits of knowledge and instead re-frames them as a conceptual understanding of some phenomenon, ideally an understanding that resembles what experts in their field accept as true or valid.
The struggle with researching conceptual change is its timeline. Restructuring knowledge look like a fast, nearly immediate process, like the “lightbulb moment” many of us experience when a concept suddenly makes sense. More frequently, restructuring is gradual, where the “lightbulb moment” occurs at the end of a long series of other events that make it possible. Actually studying this phenomenon can take years of intensive interviews or other work, making it an expensive and time-consuming research project.
The typical, ongoing process of academic assessment in any educational setting can provide a window into students’ accommodation of new knowledge, when it is designed proactively.
Tools
The growth of EdTech makes much of this possible. Simple relational databases, when set up well and shared with enough stakeholders, can provide the necessary insight into not just whether students are progressing towards degrees in a timely fashion, but also where they are encountering hurdles and how they are leaping over them. Broadening assessment procedures beyond individual assignments or courses, looking at performance criteria at as many intervals as possible, allows us to not just understand whether an academic program is working, but where students are given the knowledge and tools necessary to understand their disciplines at an expert level.
Quality Control?
My research background is in assessment not because I want to make sure the gears are turning properly to churn out graduates of a particular caliber. While that’s certainly a function of an assessment program, my interest is in a better understanding of how adults learn and how students become experts.
