Assessment and evaluation in education: Some concepts and principles

The ability to engage in high-quality assessment has become a sine qua non for the college-level educator. But, effective assessment requires mastering the professional knowledge and skills involved. The field of assessment and evaluation, like all other specialized disciplines, has developed many important concepts, principles, and methods to guide practice. A few of these are briefly discussed here. They should become part of the academician's professional armamentarium.

Assessment and evaluation
Assessment is a process of determining "what is." Assessment provides faculty members, administrators, trustees, and others with evidence, numerical or otherwise, from which they can develop useful information about their students, institutions, programs, and courses and also about themselves. This information can help them make effectual decisions about student learning and development, professional effectiveness, and program quality. Evaluation uses information based on the credible evidence generated through assessment to make judgments of relative value: the acceptability of the conditions described through assessment.

The statement "If you don't have any goals, you don't have anything to assess" expresses the close relationship between goals and effective assessment. It is goal achievement that effective assessment is generally designed to detect. An effective assessment program helps a college's or university's administrators and faculty members understand the outcomes – the results – their efforts are producing and the specific ways in which these efforts are having their effects.

Types of assessment
What is being assessed and evaluated determines the appropriate type of assessment and evaluation. For purposes of planning, desired outcomes (the ultimate results desired or actually achieved) as well as processes (the programs, services, and activities developed to produce the desired outcomes) and inputs (the resources: students, faculty and staff members, buildings, psychological climate) are all articulated in terms of goals and objectives. Thus, one can distinguish among outcome goals and objectives and outcome assessment and evaluation, process goals and objectives and process assessment and evaluation, input goals and objectives and input assessment and evaluation. Because it is results that count for most of higher education's stakeholders and critics, the emphasis today is on outcome assessment and evaluation.

Causation of outcomes
Outcome assessment, however, does not by itself produce enough evidence to permit thorough understanding of the behavior of an educational system. Outcome assessment indicates what results have been produced and how much of them. Clarifying causation – determining why the results were achieved – is the task of process assessment. Improving the quality of results depends upon improving the quality of processes. Thus, outcome assessment is not enough. In the case of learning and student development, a detailed understanding of the functioning of orientation, curriculum, instruction, academic advising, and other key educational processes is necessary for maximal improvement of institutional results. In other words, the results of both outcome and process assessment are needed to improve the quality of outcomes. The findings of process assessment research are interpreted in the light of empirically based higher-education theory to determine whether the processes being used can be expected to produce the outcomes desired with any particular set of students.

Input assessment is also necessary. It helps us understand our students. For example, input assessment can describe the characteristics of entering students: their various abilities as judged by placement testing and, among other important variables, the approaches they take to learning, their capacity for abstract reasoning and critical thinking, and their levels of epistemological and moral judgment development. This information gives faculty members, administrators, and others crucial information for designing programs appropriate to the developmental needs of specific kinds of students and of individual students.