Marcia Mentkowski

Conceptual Elements for Performance Assessment for Faculty and Student Learning

This conceptual chapter clarifies elements for performance assessment that hold promise for designing performance assessments, including capstone and portfolio assessments. Elements were originally determined by Alverno College faculty from their practice in 1973 and combined with an internal and external literature review of relevant theoretical frameworks across time. This literature review included many early citations of such concepts as active learning, self-reflection and self-monitoring, assessment and judgment in relation to criteria, and the role of samples of performance in assessment. For this chapter, citations from literature external to the College and Alverno literature have been recently reviewed and illuminated for the following elements of performance assessment, also articulated as learning processes, transformative learning cycles, and learning outcomes. (1) Self-reflection on learning own abilities; (2) Self assessing performance and using feedback to improve it over time; (3) Learners developing metacognitive performance; (4) Learners developing professional expertise; and (5) Learners developing identity as a self-sustained and unique learner, contributor, and professional.

Assessing Student Learning Outcomes Across a Curriculum

Disciplinary and professional competence in postsecondary education is made up of complex sets of constructs and role performances that differ markedly across the disciplines and professions. These often defy definition as learning outcomes because they are multidimensional and holistic. Even so, instructors who teach and assessors who evaluate competence in many fields may engage their colleagues in processes, usually within disciplines and professions, to capture enough breadth and depth of constructs and performances that are essential for particular roles. The question is whether students can integrate and transfer their learning across a curriculum and over time. Authors report on the design of an assessment technique for integration of knowledge constructs and role performances and their use, and adaptation and transfer across math and science prerequisite coursework. This assessment requires students to demonstrate scientific reasoning, quantitative literacy, analysis, and problem solving across these disciplines and over time, on demand, and in a setting outside of their regular coursework. During training of faculty assessors, independent evaluators recorded and categorized faculty questions re validity and reliability of their judgments and of assessment policies and procedures. A subgroup resolved them through action research. The authors conclude that each of the validity and reliability issues, also identified by the subgroup of multidisciplinary faculty and educational researchers, was also raised by faculty members as they were being trained as assessors. These faculty assessors were from across the disciplines and professions. Thus, faculties experienced in performance assessments who also serve as assessors of broad learning outcomes are likely to continue to develop assessment techniques with appropriate considerations of validity, reliability, and especially consequential validity. At this college, contextual and consequential validity for demonstration of individual student learning outcomes on assessments of integration and transfer imply achievement of complex, multidimensional learning outcomes, so students who were unsuccessful had further opportunity for instruction and reassessment.

Transforming College Curriculum Toward Moral Learning and Civic Responsibility

“I hope to show that educators who take joint, collaborative responsibility for a curriculum that is centered on student learning, are likely to foster students’ immediate and long-term capability for such broad and ineffable learning outcomes as moral and civic responsibility. My assumption is that a common goal we all have is to redefine the meaning of the undergraduate degree to include moral learning and civic learning so that students can and will take moral and civic responsibility. I will discuss ways to proceed so that three traditions in higher education—liberal arts, education in the professions, and educating for moral character and service—are appropriately joined.”