Why Assessment of General Education Competencies is Entirely Different from Grading

I have been aware for many years that the college where I teach has been doing a poor job with assessing general education. At times over the years I've tried talking to the people in positions of responsibility about the inadequacies of our assessment, but no one has listened. Finally I gave up and just made sure that I did things the right way even if no one else did. 

Ultimately the day of reckoning - re-accreditation - has arrived, and despite our having been slapped on the hand for our inadequate general education assessment and asked to address those deficiencies, those in decision-making positions are still not listening to me. Or rather they heard me and said you're right, but we'll deal with that sometime in the future.  Right now we're just going to do a whole lot more of the wrong thing and overwhelm them with reams of bad assessment data - done up in a pretty new chart that someone at the top thinks makes everything okay. Of course they didn't actually say that, but that seems to be the course we are taking. 

So I've been charged with collating and synthesizing these reams of bad data into some coherent whole (not really possible but I'm trying), and that is what I'm spending my "vacation" doing. As I review all of the assessment reports of all of our faculty, I am aghast at how bad things actually are - far worse than I had imagined.  I would like to be able to put all these people in a room somewhere and explain some things to them, but that is never going to happen.  For one thing, by the time the chickens come home fully to rest and the awfulness of our assessment is fully understood, I will have retired and it will be "not my circus, not my monkeys." 

So instead I'm going to deliver part of my "lecture" here, because I've got to let it out somewhere. Maybe somebody somewhere will benefit from my little rant. 

My college, as well as all other colleges in our system and most colleges in our state, has adopted a general education plan the "Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) Initiative" developed by hundreds of college faculty through the auspices of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). The LEAP initiative includes 12 essential learning outcomes for a liberal education, including communication skills, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, critical thinking, life long learning, teamwork and problem solving, and several others (https://www.aacu.org/leap/essential-learning-outcomes). To assist colleges and faculty determine whether or not they are achieving these general educational goals, the AACU developed Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education rubrics or VALUE rubrics (Source: https://www.aacu.org/value).  Having spent many years now reading the literature around the LEAP initiative and the VALUE rubrics, it is clear that the students' entire educational career should contribute to the development of these essential skills, and that proficiency in them is something that accumulates over the student entire academic career.  This means that most first semester freshmen taking their first college level courses would not be expected to be fully proficient at most of the learning outcomes, but that one would expect the majority of last semester senior students to be proficient.  

The biggest mistake that most of our faculty have made is to assume that assessment is simply an extension of grading. Having made that assumption, the majority of my colleagues then assume that they can simply use the grade from some test, paper, exercise, project or even the course as a whole, as THE measure of assessment - for a whole host of different general education areas from "inquiry and analysis," "critical and creative thinking," to "life-long learning skills," and "integrative and applied learning." As a result I am seeing faculty with first semester freshman in the first English writing course reporting that because 95% of their students got a C+ or better therefore 95% of their students are fully proficient in written communication. If that is so, then why on earth do we then require them to take a second semester of writing? Because one semester of college writing does not make most people proficient at written communication. Proficiency in writing takes lots of practice in writing, and writing different types of content (history essays, sociology journals, science term papers, etc.). Assessment is not the same as grading.

A grade is a measurement of the student's performance in a particular course. How well did the student complete all the requirements of that course? That's what a grade indicates. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the difference between grading and assessment is to use some thing that most people can understand: studying languages.  A person who wishes to study French will begin with an introductory French course. That individual may study very hard in introductory French and do all of the required work at a high level of skill - for that course - and be rewarded for their efforts with an A.  That's grading.  But then we ask, is that person who has completed a one semester course in French with an A now proficient in the speaking, writing and communicating in French. Of course not. That is assessment. Assessment is about a larger life skill that accrues over time and practice. Moreover, it is entirely possible for a person to take four semesters of French, and get an A in every single class, and still not be particularly proficient in speaking and writing French. However, if that is so, then there's probably good reason to go back and review how the courses were taught since the ultimate goal of the courses is to develop proficiency. Nonetheless we would still not expect proficiency to be the outcome of the first, or even second course, but rather some mile stone measure along the way. 

In most courses at a community college (the first two years of college), such as where I teach, we should not be looking for proficiency in most courses, but rather from evidence that students have started along the way to a particular skill or ability - for milestones.  While the development of such skills and abilities should be part of grading, they are often not the most important element in the grade even on a single assignment or activity. So grades often are poor indicators of the development of general education skills.  Assessment requires a separate set of judgments about where a student lies in the development of a body of knowledge or a set of skills.   That separate assessment could be included within the grading criteria as a percentage of a score or grade, but is unlikely to encompass all of the things that go into the grade. 

A good example is developing the skills of life long learning. Reading the AACU's material and VALUE rubric on life long learning, some years ago, I realized that a project that I always have my Social Problems students do was something that could - if tweaked just a little - contribute to developing life long learning skills. The actual grade that I give students for this project (identifying a social problem specific to their home community, and following through with research, contact with others addressing the problem, and thinking about solutions for their community) depends on many different factors, such as how well they have learnt and used the terminology of sociology, how well they write, and only a small percentage of the grade is related to life-long learning skills.  A student could get an A (low A) on the project without having exhibited higher levels of life-long learning skills.  The Life Long Learning Value rubric has five dimensions. One of those dimensions is initiative, and the lowest level (scored as "1") on the rubric for initiative is "completes required work." The second level (scored "2") is "Completes required work and identifies opportunities to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities;" and the third level (scored "3") is "Completes required work, identifies and pursues opportunities to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities." 

I set up the project in such a way to create a climate where students are encouraged to identify and pursue opportunities to expand knowledge.  I use extensive feedback in the early stages of the project, making many suggestions to students about additional information sources, and avenues they might explore. Students who do so rank high on the Life-Long Skills rubric that is used for assessment. But students who do not, have still "completed required work," which is the primary basis for the grade on the project. 

Faculty often bemoan the students for whom the grade is the end-all and be-all of college. But sometimes we get blinded by same type of narrow minded thinking - grades are not always the best measure of learning. 

May We Remember

Like many Americans the news of the deaths of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and of the police officers in Texas shook me to the core. Feelings of sadness, anxiety, fear, and from those anger, flooded me for several days. Then, like many Americans, ordinary everyday routine reclaimed my life, the knots in my stomach along with the anxiety, fear and anger ebbed. It’s not that I (we) forgot what happened, but I (we) could turn away from the immediacy and relax.

Lying in bed last night awake in the dark early morning hours, it finally occurred to me that this ability of most Americans to push these issues out of the forefront of our lives is part of the problem. Because the people most directly concerned – African Americans (especially young black men) and uniformed law enforcement – do not have this luxury.  Sadness, anxiety, fear and anger are embedded in their daily lives in way that the rest of us cannot really understand.  

However, the experiences of African Americans and uniformed law enforcement while similar in some ways are not identical.  

Sociologists use the term “master status” to encompass things those things in our lives that are central to our definition of self and our identity.  Both being “African American” and a “law enforcement officer” are important master statuses, central to the personal identity and sense of self of most of the individuals who can claim those statuses. The difference is that being “African American” is an ascribed status, one conferred at birth by having parents/grandparents with African ancestry, one imposed by society regardless of one’s own wishes, and impossible to exit except by death.  Being a “law enforcement officer” is an achieved status, obtained by study  and practice, consciously chosen as an occupation by an adult over other possible occupations; while far more central to a person’s identity than “working in a factory” or “flipping burgers,” achieved statuses such as law enforcement officer can be exited by choice resignation and retirement, or can be forced upon one by disability or death. Exiting the status of law enforcement by death is the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, law enforcement officers can and do take vacations from their status – they can take their family to Disney World and not be perceived by anyone else as a law enforcement officer.  There is no vacation from being African American.

So the thought came to me as I lay in the dark, that it is important for the rest of us – who are neither African American nor law enforcement – to remember the intensity of the fear, the anxiety, the anger and to remember that while we can let it go and get on with our lives, others must continue to deal with those destructive, life-corroding feelings every day. The goal is not to make us all live in fear and anger, but to use our memory to assist in building a society in which no one need feel that way every day. 

The Sky Is Falling: Beyond the Myth of Moral Decline

Recently several of my Christian Facebook friends shared and liked blog post The Christian Myth of America's Moral Decay by John Pavlovitz. Pavlovitz basic thesis is that in terms of individual behavior and action people are no more immoral and wicked than they have ever been;  inhumane, intolerant and hateful behavior is no more common than in the past, and corruption and injustice has been with us always. Pavlovitz suggests that what makes today different is that we now have the technological means (cell phones with cameras and video and an internet) to bring all the human nastiness to light and make everyone continuously (24/7) aware of the dark side of human behavior.

Moreover, there is substantial sociological evidence (real hard, historical data) to go even further and say that violence, crime, and physical brutality are actually on the decline in America. Although flawed in a number of ways (including being overly psychological), The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker provides ample data to show that this decline is a long term one world wide. So as I read Pavlovitz piece, I sat nodding my head in agreement with his argument:

"I’m out here every day and I see heroic, compassionate, reckless acts of beauty all the time. I see and speak to lots of inherently good people doing their best; slipping and then getting back up again. We’re all flying and failing simultaneously; gaining and losing ground and doing it again and again. I reject the myth of our downward spiral because I know how hard I and so many others are working to get this life right and to love well. I don’t believe I am in personal moral decay and I imagine the same is true for you, which is the point."

The problem is Pavlovitz prefaced the statement above with "I don’t believe we’re all slowing sliding off into the abyss, despite what some religious people say."  There I have to disagree, because we are all slowly sliding off into the abyss. At the very end of the piece Pavlovitz states: "Look up, the sky is not falling." And once again I disagree, because the sky is falling.

Where I  part ways with Pavlovitz is that while I agree that the notion of moral decay is a myth, as a sociologist I see potentially insurmountable problems facing American society that are not problems of individual morality, but rather problems of social structure. Those problems are many and wide ranging. We have an economic system (abetted by the political system) that often rewards businesses for using non-renewable resources over those that are renewable, and the increase of pollution over its minimization. By design our economy encourages businesses push the costs (in the form of health hazards and environmental degradation) out onto workers and communities, while retaining the benefits (profits) for themselves. Moreover, individuals as consumers are by design, encouraged  to use more, waste more, spend more and save less. 

We have an economic system in which there is a growing divide between the employment opportunities for those with and without an education. We have fewer and fewer employment opportunities that can sustain a person  much less a family for a lifetime without substantial educational investment. 

Our economic system is structured (with lots of help from the political system in the form of the tax structure, trade agreements, etc.)  in such a way that there are substantial rewards cost cutting - especially labor costs - and little reward for expanding employment domestically. 

Blogger Anne Amnesia of More Crows than Eagles coins a new term for all the people who are being left behind by our current economic system: the unnecessariat.  The unnecessariat are the jobless refuse of our economic system. They are the one who have been pushed out of the labor force because their labor is unnecessary to the pursuit of profit. However, as Anne Amnesia so aptly puts it "there’s certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them." The unnecessariat become legs that make the drug distribution networks,  the incarcerated bodies that mean profit for private prisons, the communities where prisons or toxic waste facilities can be located. 

So we try to funnel more people into a higher educational system for which they are inadequately prepared and often unsuited. The educational system is unprepared and increasingly underfunded to deal with their deficiencies, their needs and their desires. Worse than that many people who are prepared and engaged educationally, who actually make the educational investment do not recognize economic or financial rewards - especially when they live in communities that have fallen by the wayside (I think everyone gains something from engaging in the learning process and gaining knowledge but that's a different article).   

Over the past 240 years Americans have built a society that makes some types of choices easier than other types of choices, that favors some actions over other actions, and makes some outcomes more likely than other outcomes.  

This does not mean that people lack free will. It does not mean that we are not responsible for our decisions. It does not mean that we cannot and should not make different choices. 

What it does mean is that each individual, each family, each business, each government decision-maker finds that some choices are easy both to see and to act upon. They are the choices pointed out to us over and over again by family, school, media, leaders, etc. These are the choices that our high school guidance counselors know about, the choices that are represented by the majors at our local community and state colleges, the choices offered in our local stores or easily accessible on-line, the choices presented by our local and state government.  Other choices always exist, but they are not visible, audible to us. Some alternatives are deliberately blocked by a multitude of obstacles. We may learn what other people in other countries do, but are told that it is unAmerican, anti-capitalist, immoral, and unthinkable. We risk ostracism, intimidation, threats, and worse if we make some choices. 

So not by moral decay, but by the pressures of social structures that shape our decisions, American society is not on the brink but rather has already slid over the precipice. We are sliding downward already. The unnecessariat is growing  - they have already gone over the cliff. As for the  "precariat" Guy Standing's term for the

" multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development, including millions of frustrated educated youth who do not like what they see before them, millions of women abused in oppressive labour, growing numbers of criminalised tagged for life, millions being categorised as ‘disabled’ and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. They are denizens; they have a more restricted range of social, cultural, political and economic rights than citizens around them."

They are dangling by a thread ready to follow the unnecessariat over the edge. 

We are seeing whole communities, even whole regions that are losing or have already lost the battle. This shows in myriad ways: rising death rates for white rural men and women, the physical erosion of community physical infrastructure (think Michigan cities like Detroit and Flint which are merely the canaries in the coal mine), the political gridlock of Congress, and so much more. 

We are fraying at the bottom and the edges, and those in the middle know if even if unconsciously. They realize that they are vulnerable if not why. The causes are complex, multifaceted, involving multiple social systems, and cannot be solved by simple slogans or by a single new leader.

But wait, it gets worse. Because global warming is real. The earth's climate is actually changing. The consequences are already affecting us, and are going to become increasingly disruptive of our economic and social systems.  Just one little example to make my point - weather related power outages have been on the rise for the past twenty years. Some of the responsibility goes to increasingly extreme weather events (a consequence of climate change) and some of the responsibility to the fraying of community infrastructure (declines in public and private spending on shared infrastructure). The picture is pretty clear: 

There will come a point, when climate related changes will over-come our capacity to cope. That time is likely to come sooner rather than later, because we are also eroding the decision-making capacity of our governments, and creating larger and larger populations of people who do not have the resources to cope with catastrophe.