Your Dean and your Provost are hearing a lot about assessments from the accrediting agencies and from everyone else, and sooner or later you'll hear about it too.  We say that our goal is educating students, and -- in today's consumer-driven world -- the people who pay our salaries want to know if they are getting their money's worth. 

 

TΦ101 completely believes that the discussion of assessments has tended to conflate two completely different concerns.  On the one hand, TΦ101 entirely agrees that in planning our courses we should have clear learning objectives for our students and some way of determining whether those objectives have been met.  Instead of asking, "What do I want to teach?" we should ask, "What changes do I want to foster in my students, what will I have to do to create those changes, and how will I know if those changes have occurred?"  

All of this is quite different, however, from meeting the demand that we be able to quantify these outcomes, especially if this means that we need some sort of standardized testing. Here are a few resources on assessment:

 

• American Philosophical Association's  "Statement on Outcomes Assessment," has some useful information and also links to universities that have been working in this area. 

• The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is providing a different approach to accountability in higher education by measuring student participation effective teaching and learning activities.  Many of the activities that NSSE measures are just the kind of thing that should happen in an intro philosophy class. Students are asked, for example, how often their course work emphasizes applying theories or concepts, or how often they participate in class discussions. 

• Michael Strawser has an interesting discussion of assessment in the context of hermeneutics and continental philosophy in "Assessing Assessment: Toward a Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Perspective," in Insight 4 (2009).  

• For additional assessment ideas, see Charles W. Wright and Abraham Lauer's "Measuring the Sublime: Assessing Student Learning in Philosophy", Teaching Philosophy, Vol. 35, Issue 4 (2012) and Brian J. Huschle's "Learner Outcome Attainment in Teaching Applied Ethics versus Case Methodology," Teaching Philosophy, Vol. 35, Issue 3 (2012). 

 

Author: John Immerwahr
Update: 15 Dec. 2015 (E. Tarver); 1-2-2026--D. Sackris