Assessment: Learning by Doing

A ctivities that do not come to us naturally are learned by doing them, Aristotle (n.d.) observed: “[M]en become builders by building houses, harpers by playing on the harp.” Similarly, faculty members responsible for assessment on their campuses often lack training and instead learn by practicing it in their own institutional contexts. We may seek information about assessment through study and conferences, but we also learn from rolling up our sleeves and digging in. At Gonzaga University, learning assessment by doing it has been an incremental and imperfect but valuable process that has helped us identify strengths in the current university core curriculum and influenced our planning for a new core. As the coordinator of a set of linked courses in our core, I began looking for ways to evaluate their effectiveness in 2007. However, a background in rhetoric and literature did not equip me with research methods for measuring student learning. Even more problematic, the curriculum was established long before most of our faculty were thinking about assessment or taking it seriously, and program learning outcomes had never been specified. Since 1975, students had been required to enroll concurrently in “Thought and Expression” (T&E)—100-level courses in Composition, Critical Thinking, and Speech—and in 1995, we began enrolling cohorts of twenty students in limited numbers of linked sections. The links did have stated objectives: to reinforce skills taught in the three courses and to foster integration by creating a learning community for first-year students. However, neither Thought and Expression nor the twenty-sixyear-old core curriculum had explicit program learning outcomes that would allow for direct assessment. Still, to investigate the hypothesis that linked courses helped students improve, we had to start somewhere. We experimented with indirect and direct assessment over the next few years. First, a colleague experienced in a variety of research methods helped design and pilot a student questionnaire related to the T&E objectives. In 2008, we began by surveying students in the linked courses to ask how they perceived conceptual integration among the three courses, whether they could apply what they learned in one course in another, and how they experienced community. In 2011 and 2012, we administered a version of the student survey in several sections of T&E that were not linked. During this time, Assessment: Learning by Doing