Buzzwords: Profaning the kool-aid god?
By Thoreau
So, “assessment” is a buzzword in academia, and probably in other areas of endeavor as well. At the core, there’s little that’s objectionable to periodically taking a deeper look below the surface of what you’re doing, and seeing if it actually does what you think it does. Of course, taking a deeper look is not always easy, it requires some thought and reflection, and making it into an obligatory and constant bureaucratic exercise is not a good way to generate useful and thoughtful efforts.
Going beyond the reasonable notion that you should periodically take a deeper look at what you’re doing, pedagogical reformers of many sorts get convert zeal and treat assessment as a moral imperative. But, when a religion has enough zealous adherents, it might suddenly become mainstream. And when it goes mainstream, it goes from being pure to being mass market lowest common denominator oversaturation. The word “assessment” is no longer just confined to careful examinations of how well something is working. It isn’t even just applied to a bureaucratic ritual of report-writing focused on the curriculum. It’s applied to every piece of paper, every report, every bit of data, any and every piece of bureaucracy and hoop-jumping and report-generating. The odds are good that a time sheet will soon be marked “Hours assessment” and an account statement will be marked “Fiscal assessment.”
So, at lunch the other day a colleague who has drunk deeply of the kool-aid remarked on how much he hated having to write a friggin’ report over some small piece of triviality. And I said to him “Oh, I thought you’d be a big fan of assessment?” (He and I get along well enough that I can good-naturedly chide him for drinking the kool-aid and he can chide me for not drinking it. Or maybe he’s just pretending to enjoy our banter while he works on converting me.) And then he reminded me that there’s Real Assessment (done by True Scotsmen, I imagine) and all of the bullshit that they make us do.
And so I had a new insight into buzzwords and kool-aid: While some kool-aid drinkers might exult when the bureaucracy embraces their cause and turns it into a buzzword that we must all pay homage to, those who hold it sacred view their idol as having been profaned. And so I actually gained a bit of respect for some of the kool-aid drinkers. Say what you will about the tenets of assessment, dude. At least it’s an ethos.
Comment by KWK —
November 1, 2010 @ 6:26 pm
Yes, but who assesses the efficacy of the assessment?
I heard an awesome story a few weeks ago about a company that was interested in assessing workplace productivity, so they required employees to document their actions and accomplishments for every 8-minute increment during the workday. That caused significant conflict when the employees began documenting that they spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 30 minutes of every day documenting what they had been doing with their time quanta. While the employees were, of course, “working” during that time, management had a hard time finding the appropriate client accounts to bill for their employees’ efforts at documenting their efforts.
Comment by Thoreau —
November 1, 2010 @ 6:36 pm
I have heard of “assessment of assessment” coming from 2 different quarters: True believers who want to assess assessment because that’s what they do, and cynics demanding to know whether there’s any evidence that all this assessment effort does a damn bit of good.
Comment by dave —
November 2, 2010 @ 11:06 am
I work in “business intelligence” or BI and trust me, most “Assessment” is just Taylorism in disguise. Very lucrative for BI, almost useless anywhere else. I once worked for a group at a software company that hired a consultant to come up with performance metrics. Three months later she had more than 200 that we were somehow supposed to compile and measure.
Comment by Michael —
November 2, 2010 @ 11:27 am
The fact is that anything that you want to improve must be assessed in some fashion. Improvement can never occur if there is no scrutiny.
At the same time we must be certain that the evaluation process evaluates the right things, and that it isn’t so painful that it obviates any gains from the evaluation itself.
If assessment is turning into a fad, it’s because there is such a strong reactionary movement from entities such as teachers’ unions, which universally oppose all forms of standardized testing of students and all forms of evaluation of teachers…
Comment by Thoreau —
November 2, 2010 @ 11:33 am
Michael,
I don’t disagree with those points. And I’ll be the last one to defend unions for tenured faculty–if you have tenure, and through service you have a say in the administration of the place, what’s the point of a union? (The part-time, untenured lecturers are a different story, though, and they need a union.)
However, the school should reward thoughtful assessment instead of mandating ritualistic bureaucratic exercises and slapping the word “assessment” on everything, even exercises that are in no way meaningful assessments.
A cynic might say that the over-use of the word actually helps those who most oppose assessment: If you get to pretend that anything and everything is an assessment, you don’t have to actually do anything meaningful.
Comment by Paul W —
November 2, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
My wife is a professor, and her department is currently going through an accreditation process, so I’m hearing a lot about this lately. They are having to come up with a degree-program-wide list of “evidence” indicating that students learned what they should have learned from their program. So they are picking out particular assignments and test questions to commit to using over the accreditation cycle to prove that their children is learning.
Am I nuts to think that this aspect of assessment ought to be covered by the curriculum and grading process? If the course curriculum covers X and the student got a B, then what’s the point of picking out one or two particular aspects of X to judge the student on?
But how do you know the faculty aren’t just giving good grades to their students? I think a certain amount of self-correction would be inherent in a well-designed curriculum where different instructors teach different courses, and it becomes clear who’s doing a good job of teaching their students the building block and who isn’t.
Trying to parse out some universal subset of knowledge from a broad curriculum is just asking for more trouble. Instructors will learn that it’s not important to prepare your students for the next courses in the program, but just to make sure they get the answer to this question correct.
I think assessment gone wild is going to tear up our academic institutions from the inside out, as more and more resources are poured into assessment process.
In my own job at a different university, I see dozens of FTEs and millions of dollars going into initiatives to use electronic portfolios to track undergraduate progress throughout their degree program. The paradox of computerization, though, is that you actually lose flexibility. In five years if you want to adjust what data you’re collecting or how you handle certain aspects, you have a massive project–bigger than the initial rollout–on your hands to rewrite your assessment system to handle both ways of tracking the data. And each college and department needs its own customizations, and you very quickly lose the benefits of IT and it just becomes another massive overhead cost.
Meanwhile, less and less of higher education’s budget goes to instruction every year, while we obsess over quantifying every detail of our existence in a way that relates to nothing real.
Comment by Chris —
November 2, 2010 @ 3:45 pm
The infection has filtered down to all levels of education. I teach 6 year olds. During the first 5 weeks of school I was required to administer 11 different assessments to each child individually and continue to assess them every 3 weeks. We meet every 3 weeks to look at the assessments and decide if we need more assessments.
We have “experts” come and do “walk throughs” to assess everything from furniture placement to facial expressions and tone of voice based upon the doctor’s rounds model.
There are dozens of district mandated assessments required in addition to the school based assessments, all to prepare our students for the state assessments.
Problem is we are spending so much time assessing that there’s little time left to actually teach anything. We have a 180 day school year and I counted 143 days of assessments scheduled at the beginning of the year. Not all assessments are required of all grade levels but this shows the impact of assessment on education today.
Schools love to hop on these bandwagons regardless of the efficacy. And teachers are rarely included in the discussions around and planning of these assessments.
Teacher and union bashing aside, I know of few, if any, teachers that oppose assessment entirely. In fact, we are pretty expert at assessing what our students know and don’t know and what to do about it.
We do object to assessing for the sake of assessing so people can walk around looking serious and mumbling “accountability” and take pot shots at teachers and public schools to assuage their guilt over opposing any meaningful action toward eliminating inequality in our society.
Comment by hf —
November 4, 2010 @ 11:44 am
Centuries ago, the teacher and the students sat together for class, and when the student felt they’d learned enough, class was over.
But maybe those students were lying, so someone came up with the idea that the teacher would give the students a test and a grade.
But maybe those teachers were lying, so someone came up with the idea that some state authority would give the students a bigger more important test, and then give the teacher a grade.
But maybe those authorities were lying, so someone came up with the idea of giving the students yet another even more bigger test and then give the state authorities a grade.
The strange thing is, there are still people who talk about standardized testing as if it’s an original idea that hasn’t been implemented yet.