A Mature Approach to Assessment

Educators can tend to focus on teaching rather than student learning. As such, assessing student outcomes is perceived as additional work not directly related to their craft and is an occasional exercise required to meet the demands of program accreditors. This attitude parallels that of software developers who see the need to deliver a software project on time and on budget as something that constrains their creative work. The Capability Maturity Model has been adopted by many software organizations as a framework to help change attitudes and improve the software development process. In this paper we show that the same principles can be applied to the assessment process to achieve the same goals.