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Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment, edited by Donna Heiland and Laura J. Rosenthal, with the assistance of Cheryl Ching. New York, NY: The Teagle Foundation, 2011. Available as a free download at: http://www.teaglefoundation.org/disciplinaryassessment/
Coming to Terms with Student Outcomes Assessment: Faculty and Administrators' Journeys to Integrating Assessment in Their Work and Institutional Culture, edited by Peggy L. Maki. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2010. 248 pages. $75 Cloth; $24.95 Paper; $19.99 Ebook.
Today's vigorous assessment movement is beset by tensions captured in the titles of the two books under review. Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime's juxtaposition of terms is deliberately subversive, suggesting that it's time to challenge the widespread belief that important kinds and qualities of learning will, like Emily Dickinson's flowers, forever evade definition and therefore assessment. Of course, such sentiments, justified or not, are a luxury today, running counter to the relentlessly explicit task of accounting for student learning outcomes.
Mary Taylor Huber is senior scholar emerita and consulting scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education, focusing especially on the scholarship of teaching and learning. She is co-author, most recently, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005) and The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact (2011).
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