What is Assessment?

Assessment is using evidence to determine how well you’re achieving desired results and, when you’re not adequately achieving those results, planning and implementing changes so you can achieve them in the future.

High quality assessment includes:

• Clearly defining and communicating desired results
• Specifying the satisfactory level of achievement of those results
• Using reliable evidence to determine how well you’re achieving those desired results
• Creating and implementing plans to reach the satisfactory level achievement when you’ve fallen short

In higher education, we usually delineate two categories of assessment: 1) academic assessment, which focuses on student learning, and 2) institutional effectiveness assessment, which focuses on administrative and operational effectiveness.

For a simple and more personal example, let’s consider your health.

Most of us want to be healthy. "Being healthy" is an outcome, but it’s not terribly well defined. Someone might more clearly define being healthy as:

• Being able to climb five flights of stairs without getting winded
• Being at low risk for a heart attack
• Having the energy and motivation to do everything we most want to do

Once those outcomes are defined, we might say to ourselves, “I eat mostly healthy foods and I exercise, so I’m healthy.” But eating well and exercising are inputs. They are not evidence that you’re achieving the desired health outcomes. To get evidence of whether those inputs are leading to the desired results, you would need to do some tests. It’s easy to test whether you can climb five flights of stairs without getting winded, and you can check in with yourself to see if you have the energy and motivation to do everything you most want to do. But to see if you’re at low risk for a heart attack you’d likely need to see your primary care practitioner and get some medical tests, such as having your cholesterol checked.

These are fairly straightforward measures because they’re individual rather than collective. When we want to assess something more complex, such as an academic program or a financial aid office, we typically need some coordination and to have systems in place to collect and evaluate evidence. But the general principles are the same. If you find that your cholesterol is too high, you can try to address it by making changes to your diet and exercise routines. If you find that too few of your students are achieving the desired level of competence in a specific educational outcome, you can make changes to your pedagogy and/or curriculum.