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In the late 1980s, as student outcomes assessment was first taking hold in higher education, I interviewed a number of faculty members who had been pulled into the movement's orbit. One still sticks with me: a professor of art history at a large research university who recounted the experience of having to sit down with her department colleagues—for the first time ever—to hash out their collective goals for majors. It was a difficult conversation, she told me, surfacing serious disagreements but eventually yielding a more shared vision of what students in the program should know and be able to do.
Clarifying goals is, admittedly, only the first step in the assessment process. Nevertheless, the experience recounted by that faculty member twenty-some years ago says a lot about the power of assessment at the departmental and disciplinary level to engage the professoriate in substantive ways.
Pat Hutchings (hutchings@carnegiefoundation.org) is a senior associate with The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she previously served as vice president and senior scholar. She has written and spoken widely on student outcomes assessment, integrative learning, the peer review of teaching, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her most recent book is The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact (2011), with co-authors Mary Taylor Huber and Anthony Ciccone. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was a senior staff member at the American Association for Higher Education. From 1978–1987 she was a faculty member and chair of the English department at Alverno College.
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