Upcoming and Recent Presentations

In the current climate of higher education assessment, evaluation is entangled with assessment practice, accreditation, and accountability. Public rhetoric has been deeply focused on accountability in language and intent, with little effort to deal with the complexity of teaching and learning across post-secondary options. While some recent assessments—such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and AAC&Us VALUE project—are focused on student learning and performance, their overwhelming purposes and uses seem more oriented to different forms of accountability. While potentially serving as forms of self assessment, such efforts seem lacking in the power of evaluation—as Cronbach might have suggested—to illumine these educational programs. The following presentation uses the experience of a consortium of two year colleges to examine how the participants used analysis of their learning initiatives (reporting on progress, giving and getting feedback to one another) to develop and strengthen evaluative narratives for their own efforts.