4.1.5 Moving Toward an Assessment Culture

What is an Assessment Culture?

The creation of an assessment culture involves individual stakeholders at all levels consistently striving to elevate the quality of their performance across their organizational roles. Examining student, faculty, administrator, or personal performance in an assessment culture requires a shift in mindset (4.1.2 Distinctions Between Assessment and Evaluation). An assessment culture does not focus on perfection within static performances, but rather on improving future performances within a dynamic environment to foster the growth of each individual within the culture. Furthermore, because an assessment culture focuses on the assessee, individual members of the culture are free to pursue growth, as guided by the values of the organization, in ways that matter to them. This pursuit of growth builds ownership of roles within the culture, as well as increasing accountability, productivity, and job satisfaction. A 2000 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report highlights the importance of job satisfaction to the future of higher education when it states that the culture within which faculty work “must make faculty life rewarding and enticing for the next generation that will have to staff higher education.”

In order to better understand what it means for a program, department, or organization to move toward an assessment culture, it is helpful to define the meaning of the term culture. In this context, culture is defined as a set of “predominating attitudes and behaviors that characterize the functioning of a group or organization.” It is a “way of life” that consists of “socially transmitted behavior patterns resulting from training and education” leading to “refinement” or “enlightenment.” Thus, a culture is a system produced by educating and refining the attitudes, ways of thinking, and behaviors of members within a social organization.

It is also important to identify behaviors or practices that indicate when a culture has truly been created. Minimally, there must be a community practicing the culture at various levels of experience so that growth and evolution of cultural attitudes and behaviors can occur. Furthermore, members of the culture need to identify themselves with the group and its associated activities so that they can take ownership of the culture and commit to its values.

What makes a culture an assessment culture? First, an assessment culture values growing the performance of its members. It is follows the strong assessment principles outlined in 4.1.1 Overview of Assessment to continually grow the performance of its members so that they achieve higher quality outcomes at all levels. An assessment culture is assessee-centered, it values an environment of mutual trust and respect, it uses agreed upon criteria, and capitalizes on the expertise and skills of those conducting the assessment. Finally, an assessment culture utilizes effective and well-defined assessment processes to facilitate growth (4.1.4 Assessment Methodology).

Benefits of an Assessment Culture

What are the tangible rewards for a department, institution, or community that moves toward an assessment culture? First, an assessment culture ties naturally into the expectations of accrediting agencies (1.5.1 Writing a Self-Study Report). Second, an assessment culture creates a collaborative vision, building on annual peer review processes that empower faculty and provide strong guidance along the road to tenure and promotion (1.2.4 Profile of a Quality Faculty Member). Third, efficiency and cost-effectiveness improve dramatically when faculty and program goals align with administrative goals (1.5.2 Methodology for Designing a Program Assessment System). Strong assessment practice embedded within annual program review and planning cycles naturally moves toward such alignment. Fourth, as interdisciplinary collaboration increases and one set of faculty begins to demonstrate the characteristics of an assessment culture, faculty in other disciplines also begin to see the benefits of the culture (1.3.8 Successful Institutional Change—The Human Dimension), thus, the culture grows. Finally, when people receive quality assessment and experience its benefits, they are likely to crave more of it (4.1.3 Mindset for Assessment). People enjoy getting better at what they do and improving their performance, which is what an assessment culture is all about.

Characteristics of an Assessment Culture

An assessment culture values people and what they can do because it validates and seeks to improve performance within the context of the organization. Visualizing how these factors present themselves within the culture of an academic institution can give faculty a good idea of how they might fit into an assessment culture and what kinds of activities support the growth and sustainability of such a culture.

In an assessment culture, the goal is clear. A simple analogy is the Kennedy space program. The goal of reaching the moon was universally shared, and people across many aspects of American culture worked together to achieve those goals. Members of an assessment culture tend to reflect this kind of interdependency in every facet of their personal and professional lives. A well-developed assessment culture results in a high-performance environment in which real changes/improvements occur that can be directly linked to the assessment process. Members of an assessment culture focus on positive feedback to help each other learn and grow; they value the ideas of students, colleagues, and supervisors; they are focused on improving performance rather than feeling defensive or handing out judgments; and they work with others to understand and define criteria within the context of a performance before beginning each assessment activity.

Several layers of participation correlating with Performance Levels for Assessors (4.1.6) may be easily identified in an assessment culture. At the center of the culture are the champions. These veteran members have significant training and experience to serve as mentors and drive the culture. They continually seek opportunities for assessment and are able to articulate plans of action that motivate others within the culture. Next are the beneficiary-practitioners of the culture who have experienced significant tangible rewards from assessment activities and are motivated to expand their own assessment practice and to guide others as well. They are comfortable with assessment practice and can generate valuable results for assessees and themselves. The outer layer of members in an assessment culture contains those who are new to the culture. These people may see the value of assessment but are still learning the concepts of assessment. At this level the effort to learn and apply the principles of assessment may appear substantial enough to outweigh many of the benefits.

Quality guidelines to help move toward an assessment culture with these characteristics are presented by Maki (2004), and a number of case studies demonstrating how these translate to student success are discussed by Kuh, Kinzie, Shuh, & Whitt, (2005).

Table 1 lists activities and practices that support an assessment culture. Not all of these activities are necessarily present within the culture at any one time. However, any assessment culture will contain a mixture of assessment activities that apply to both daily and long-term practice.

When implemented effectively, most of the processes and activities presented in Table 1 will add significant support to an assessment culture and create buy-in for those new to the culture. The single most effective method of building support and buy-in from the entries in Table 1, however, may be peer coaching. A central theme for quality assessment is a focus on the assessee, and peer coaching allows people to be valued for who they are and what they can do. Peer coaching also promotes ownership of the processes being assessed by aligning action plans to improve performance with the values of those who do the performance. Finally trained peer coaches provide a high-quality assessment, again a factor in creating buy-in.

Factors that Produce Cultural Change

Factors that support or hinder cultural change must be identified before effective change can occur. Without understanding these factors, achieving buy-in from faculty or any other member of the culture can be very difficult. Two very different sets of factors should be recognized: those that are internal, and those that are external to the daily practices of members within the culture.

Within a group or organization a distinct hierarchy usually dictates much of the way in which change occurs. This top-down approach, though extremely common, creates little ownership for members practicing within the culture. Nonetheless, requirements imposed from the top tend to create conditions leading to change.

In higher education, external factors can also motivate change. These include accrediting agencies, professional societies, and governmental agencies whose expectations and requirements of higher education significantly impact practice. A second type of external motivator is observation occurring as a result of collaboration with people outside one’s cultural enclave. For example, faculty outside of an assessment culture may observe the practice of others within an assessment culture. When those outside the culture see the tangible rewards that those within it experience, movement towards an assessment culture may begin. As these cultural attitudes and practices are transmitted, those exposed to it on a regular basis may begin to practice it.

The following list provides resources for further exploration of external motivators.

• Maki (2004) provides a thorough description and discussion of the positive impact external motivators can create.

• Stiehl and Lewchuck (2002) describe methods for designing outcomes that align with external motivators.

• The ASHE-ERIC report (Kezar, 2000) includes an analysis of the ways in which external pressures act to create conditions for change.

• Haessig and Potin (2004) describe ways to avoid problems that may be created by external pressures in a series of “lessons learned in the assessment school of hard knocks.”

For sustainable and effective movement toward an assessment culture, external pressures must combine with internal motivators, including both the positive aspects of an assessment culture and the negative aspects of the current culture. Perceived benefits of an assessment culture include the value of personal ownership for processes within the culture, opportunity for personal growth, significant rewards for increased levels of performance (as defined by strong evaluation systems), personal satisfaction derived from improved performance, and increased collaboration.

Motivators resulting from negative aspects of a current culture may include dissatisfaction with student learning or program outcomes, inefficient use of resources, pressure to achieve promotion and tenure requirements without sufficient support, and lack of useful feedback on grant proposals. Institutional inertia, however, may be the greatest impediment to cultural change. As higher education shifts from a knowledge paradigm to a learning paradigm, well established practices are being challenged (1.4.9 Turning Evaluation into Assessment), and some faculty who successfully navigated the old system and produced respected outcomes may feel that the effort to learn a new system is not worth the effort. Faculty inertia is further compounded by the problems of a top-down approach where faculty are “forced” to use new processes and, therefore, do not take ownership of those processes.

Other processes that may impede cultural change include delays in making or implementing decisions based on assessment; for example, budget decisions may not be made until many months after an assessment is completed. Other impediments include scheduling difficulties that prevent faculty being available for professional development activities, lack of financial support to provide training in assessment, lack of quality assessment feedback due to poorly trained assessors, lack of clear responsibility for producing assessment results, and lack of trust about how assessment data and results will be used (Haessig, et al., 2004).

Table 2 provides a summary of factors that produce cultural change, including a sample list of external and internal motivators. It also lists elements that promote change along with potential impediments to change.