As Mikhail noted at the first BLSCI sandwich and cookie-fest, we’re being encouraged to develop new assessments of our work. I thought it would be good to try to get a discussion going here on Cacophony where we could share our thoughts about assessment.

At the CUNY Writing Fellows Orientation, I attended a breakout session where we looked at a compilation of the surveys given to all of the WAC-WID Coordinators at CUNY. We learned a few lessons. Each program is drastically different in structure, oversight, and activity. In some ways these differences reflect the particularities of the CUNY campuses; in other ways, they are just the products of local bureaucracies. Nearly every program has some element of faculty development, though with varying incentives for participation. Most programs have a web presence, and a few are experimenting with new media as an instructional tool. The writing-intensive requirements vary wildly across the campuses, and nearly every campus expressed concern about constant change and limited resources. Finally, a question on “How do you measure the work you are doing?” garnered responses that effectively said, “we assess,” without much exploration of what that meant.

I reference this survey because I think that when doing assessment, it is necessary to first understand the role of your program within the whole institution. The BLSCI (of which the Writing Fellows are only a small part) has a unique challenge because while we are committed to improving communication-intensive instruction, this means very different things in each of the disciplines. Such a situation complicates assessment, not least of all because it depends wholly on the input of a group of individuals who are not necessarily the best-positioned to design and perform assessment: fellows. We’re mostly temporary employees who are completing our degrees and applying for full-time gigs. At the same time, we work for an Institute that is the closest thing to a Teaching and Learning Center that Baruch has, so we should have something to say about how assessment works.

This situation exists in tension with some of the “Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning,” as outlined by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Indiana University-Kokomo. I found the following points of particular interest: “Assessment works best when it’s ongoing, not episodic;” “Assessment fosters improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved;” and “Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change.” In addition to exploring our work within our narrow assignments, then, assessment is needed of the environments within which that work takes place: the curricula of the Weissman and Zicklin schools, the functioning of the Institute, and the mission of CUNY. Assessment should be done of administration as well as of courses and special programs, and our input, as fellows, should be integrated with a larger, systematic approach where the utility of assessment is clearly stated. Too often I fear that assessment is done merely for self-justification. An assessment that maintains the status quo is difficult to get on-board with, while an assessment that will yield improvements at the college could be exciting.

One idea dominated the breakout session I mentioned above: that Writing Fellows and WAC/WID programs at CUNY would benefit greatly from the centralization of information (though not of the administration of WAC/WID programs). The Office of Undergraduate Education is making strides in structuring support for the provincial programs that can be shaped to local concerns, particularly by promising a central digital archive that organizes and distributes the knowledge being generated on the campuses. What other campuses do for and with assessment would be a component of this, which is great.

What other questions might we ask and information might we seek as we begin to assess our path to assessment?