assessment

Few words strike fear in the hearts of post-secondary teachers more than “assessment.” Most faculty in undergraduate and graduate-level education are better-versed in their own specializations than they are in the more administrative aspects of their schools. Assessment often feels like one of those top-down assignments that faculty must add to their workload in order to get ready for the next accreditation visit.

Darla K. Deardorff provides relief from this fear by removing the mystery from the process of assessment. She places it within the healthy context of enabling teachers to see if their work is actually accomplishing what they intend for it to accomplish, and, on a broader scale, if the overall mission of the institution is being achieved. Deardorff takes time to define all of the technical terms so that even those who feel like novices in this domain understand the issues, making it an easy read. The second half of the book is comprised entirely of appendices, full of succinct guidelines on how to create and implement an assessment plan along with examples of tools and processes used at various schools.

The book begins in an engaging manner by using several myths regarding assessment as a foil to make a case for the importance of doing assessment well. The second chapter then looks at thirty frequently asked questions about assessment. Once the reader finishes the first two chapters, he or she is prepared to find out more about the distinctive aspects of international education and learn what goes into creating an effective assessment program – from start, through implementation, and finally to evaluation and revision.

Most of this book would serve as a practical guide for anyone involved in educational assessment, but Deardorff relates the book most specifically to those engaged in international education, by which she means “efforts that address the integration of international, intercultural, or global dimensions into education” (29). This includes schools with study abroad programs, those with a strong international student or faculty presence on campus, or even those that are actively engaged in preparing students to work in other cultures or simply be better global citizens. This adds a level of complexity to the assessment process that traditional models of assessment have not addressed.

While many books on assessment are geared more toward institutional assessment in comparison with other institutions or benchmarks, Deardorff is focused on student learning outcomes and how one knows whether or not they are being achieved. Special attention is given to whether or not methods of measuring these outcomes are both valid and accurate. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this kind of assessment, but the processes outlined in the book should help any institution create an assessment plan that is both feasible and useful. While it is vital that faculty be heavily involved in this process, a good assessment plan will involve multiple stakeholders, will be integrated into the ongoing program of the school, will make use of both indirect and direct methods of feedback, and will make use of well-planned rubrics.

This is a book for assessment professionals; it is the rare teacher in higher education who would be able or willing to get this deep into the weeds of higher education assessment design and deployment. Many of the fifty-two authors contributing to this volume are affiliated with the Educational Testing Service and most seem to be practitioners of assessment for corporations or academic institutions. As the foreword clearly states, the authors are a mix of psychometricians and cognitive psychologists “bringing measurement science into real-world practice” (xx). The book is geared to a multidisciplinary audience, including “educational measurement researchers,” “assessment development practitioners,” and graduate students interested in the measurement of cognition. It is not suitable for classroom teachers interested in exploring course or program assessment.

The greatest value of this volume for the average faculty member at any type of institution will be to provide a lens through which to view the many requests from higher administration to comply with particular types of assessment practices. The first part of the book, which comprises ten chapters, covers frameworks for assessment, and several of the earlier articles in this section are general enough to provide useful insight into assessment protocols. Most of the other two sections, focusing on Methodologies (six chapters) and Applications (seven chapters), are so detailed and technical as to be inaccessible to non-professionals in the field of assessment. A few articles stand apart from this: “Assessing and Supporting Hard-to-Measure Constructs in Video Games” by Valerie Shute and Lubin Wang, and “Conversation-Based Assessment” by G. Tanner Jackson and Diego Zapata-Rivera – both provide interesting alternative visions for approaching assessment and offer promising departures from the typical standardized written assessment.

This volume is full of cutting-edge research on cognition and assessment couched in language inaccessible to those outside the field. The brief “Final Words” section contains a plea that classroom faculty should note: “in order for the work in this Handbook to have the best chance of finding its way into practice, we need to be ambassadors of this research while understanding that it will require time, patience, and functional prototypes to persuade clients and users to believe the scientific and social evidence” (586). This is not the entry-level volume that will allow faculty to help as ambassadors of this sort. This anthology will be of interest primarily to those whose professional focus for research or practice is cognition and assessment in education.

Editors Cano and Ion offer a group of international voices in their contribution to the Advances in Higher Education and Professional Development Book Series (series editor, Jared Keengwe), with this volume focusing on innovative practices in assessment. The book’s organization structure involves general contents followed by a detailed table of contents with full abstracts for each chapter, then a thorough summary of each of the twenty authors’ works in the preface before turning to relevant chapters. Such a format facilitates pinpointing the reader’s interest in particular methodologies for assessment, measurement, and data-gathering. The volume itself is divided into three main sections: (I) Theoretical Approaches on Students’ Assessment, (II) Research-Based Evidences on Assessment, and (III) Innovative Practices in Students’ Assessment.

The editors claim that the purpose of their book is to attend to an international level of assessment innovation with a triple perspective (theoretical, practical, and research-based), that integrates theory and practice to enrich the field of assessment (xvii). Authors have created scenario-specific assessment innovations and practices in each of their chapters so readers have a variety of choices from which to draw ideas.

Section I focuses on engaging students in self-, peer-, and professor-based assessment loops. Self-regulated learning that is based on assessment, both in face-to-face and online environments, is addressed in the chapters one through three, and six. Competency-based assessment, where student competencies are measured against standards of performance, is illustrated in chapter four. “Brain-Based Learning” discusses the neuroscience of feedback and application to contexts in chapter five. “Comparative Judgement” is introduced in chapter seven as an alternative assessment domain to counter standardized tasks and test scoring.

Section II moves to research about assessment versus testing cultures, beginning in chapter eight with meaning-oriented learning rather than recall and recognition learning. Research in this chapter shows that students will make the effort to succeed when asked to do more complex thinking than is required for standardized testing. Feeding back and feeding forward are discussed as case studies and analyses in chapters nine and ten. Self-direction and student participation are also analyzed in case studies in chapters eleven and twelve, followed by online assessment projects conducted in Portugal and Spain in the remaining two chapters of this section.

Section III names innovative practices in student assessment. The remaining chapters in the book (fifteen through twenty) attend to pedagogical approaches to incorporate assessment into the learning endeavor. The chapters include case studies and strategies. Practical applications including project-based learning and formative assessment are outlined by each set of authors.

The book is a reference resource, best used by browsing topics and making choices about which innovative approaches to assessment best fit one’s own context. There is some overlap in authors’ experiences, reinforcing the validity of the international research and pedagogical approaches. This resource, filled with illustrations, should be available in libraries for institutions of higher education that are working on self-study and self-assessment. There is much here to aid teachers in honing their attention to assessment excellence as part of the pedagogical task.

This global study of teaching, learning, and assessment goes beyond the typical single country context to extend to good pedagogical practice on six continents.The argument of each chapter is supported by examples of good practice accounts from around the world, a collection that forms a refreshing change from a generic case study model. Although the examples lean most heavily toward English-speaking institutions and classrooms, there is significant attention paid to various elements of pedagogy from many cultural perspectives. The author takes great care throughout the book to consider all elements of the changing higher education landscape, including the changing student body, changes in technology, and changes in expectations about the goals of higher education and graduate employability.

The twelve chapters of this book take a comprehensive view of diversity in higher education teaching, learning, and assessment. The book opens with a consideration of cultural mores and assumptions that directly affect interactions in higher education. Brown looks both to the past and the future in subsequent chapters, noting pedagogical traditions and innovations in the context of today’s higher education landscape. She argues that we must adjust to a technology-rich world that necessitates more focus on “learning how and learning why than on learning what” (21). Her view of technology in the balance as both a distraction and a valuable addition to certain aspects of both teaching and learning is refreshing, as so many books either glorify or decry technology in classrooms and society. This ability to see things in the balance is one of the greatest strengths of this book: rather than arguing for a “best” way to teaching or learning or assessment, this book offers multiple possibilities from multiple contexts and thus leaves much to the reader to judge based on his or her context and constraints.

Brown identifies a few global trends. The most widespread seems to be a move from transmissive to transformative education. She notes that there is a “movement from perceiving the university teacher as an all-knowing, unchallengeable authority figure” (27) and parallel a movement by institutions and disciplines toward encouraging learning outside of the lecture hall. Another trend is teaching toward the multiple literacies expected of a twenty-first century graduate, looking well beyond academic literacy to digital, assessment, and interpersonal literacies (88). Finally, Brown notes that all education needs to think of itself as taking place in a global environment. This book is itself a fine way to encourage broader thinking about pedagogical contexts in higher education: our students are shortchanged when we privilege our own pedagogical traditions and ignore the broader, global context of higher education.

The strengths of this book are many. For instance, the author provides substantive and exhaustive bulleted lists in each chapter, a diverse set of highlighted good practice accounts, and a full chapter devoted to higher education teacher development. The book is easy to navigate, written in clear prose, and at once expansive but grounded in particulars. I would recommend this book highly to teachers and administrators in higher education across the disciplines.