Twelve Tips: Building High‐Quality Assessment through Peer Review

I s our institution’s assessment successful? The question is relatively simple. The answer is not. At first blush, one might respond: All programs that are mandated to submit assessment reports do so. After all, full participation is clearly desirable. Reflection, however, reveals this criterion to be superficial. If the submitted reports are of poor quality, then success has not been achieved. The next logical response might be: all programs practice high-quality assessment. While a more compelling answer, other questions immediately follow. What does high-quality assessment look like? What type of data would indicate high-quality assessment? At James Madison University (JMU), this line of questioning led us to a small, dimly lit corner of the assessment literature called meta-assessment (Ory 1992). Essentially, it is the process of evaluating the quality of assessment practices. While the term is uncommon, engagement in meta-assessment can add real value to a university. We began meta-assessment work in the mid-2000s. Since that time, faculty have been incorporated as peer reviewers, and assessment quality has improved dramatically among our academic units. Notably, the proportion of degree programs demonstrating exemplary assessment has risen from 1% to over 50%. More importantly, meta-assessment is helping JMU evolve from being an assessment institution to a learning improvement institution, a shift that earned JMU a 2015 Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) Award for Outstanding Institutional Practice in Student Learning Outcomes. In this article, the purpose is not to take readers blow by blow through our process. Instead, it is to highlight twelve tips for organizing assessment practice. The tips should be useful to general assessment practitioners as well as those who wish to implement a meta-assessment process at their institution. The closing tip is the most important, as it puts a capstone on the symbiotic connection between assessment and learning. Tip 1. Obtain administrative buy-in. In the early stages, be clear that evaluating and improving a university’s assessment processes is challenging. The purpose is to build an assessment system that can stand the test of time, as opposed to a “just-in-time” Twelve Tips: Building High-Quality Assessment through Peer Review