Assessment in Higher Education

I learned a great deal from today’s session, “Assessment: A Tool for Decision Making and Strategic Planning in the Higher Education Environment”. While effective assessment is imperative in every professional context, higher education has a distinct responsibility to utilize assessments to gauge performance and effect change. One of the elements of the presentation that I found to be most valuable was the definition of assessment as “an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving performance”. The emphasis was on the idea that in order to be effective, assessment must be valued and embedded as part of an institution/office culture. Balancing the challenges and opportunities of assessment such as the quality of the assessment vs. time available and using sound methodologies vs. the reality of data collection are issues that most institutions can relate to, however, if one focuses on creating an assessment that will provide useful results that can help improve performance it will be of use to concentrate on the essential components of a quality assessment.

On the theme of higher education and assessment, the Education Abroad session was very informative. Mark Hayes, the Associate Director of AU Abroad, introduced some interesting data on where AU stands in relation to the aggregate study abroad trends in the U.S. It is clear that the AU Abroad staff assess their students’ needs, as they are successful in sending 60% of their undergraduates abroad in addition to developing new ways to engage more students in study abroad.