Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution, Peggy Maki, American Association of Higher Education, 2004
Reviewed by Laurie Richlin, PhD, Claremont Graduate University

When we assembled the members of our 2004-2005 Faculty Learning Community on Teaching to Know How Well Students Are Learning (FLCSL), we had chosen was Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, by Linda Suskie, a wonderful source for designing student assessment.  Although that book has been very useful for our professors' classroom evaluation, it does not get to the level of assessment the program directors required.  Luckily, Peggy Maki's book arrived right in time to provide the structure they needed. 

Formerly Senior Scholar and Director of Assessment at the American Association for Higher Education, Maki is concerned with programs (department, division, school) and institution-wide structures and practices.  Her goal in this book is to create "fit" between institutional and program student learning goals and how those goals are met throughout the students' entire education. Rather than concentrating on learning in individual courses, she lays out an ambitious plan for all of the stakeholders in the institution to develop and implement a campus-wide system for assessing their larger educational goals.  She suggests, for instance, collective questions, such as:

How well do students transfer and apply concepts, principles, ways of knowing, and problem solving across their major program of study?

How well do students integrate their core curriculum, general studies, or liberal studies into their major program or field of study?

How well do students develop understanding, behaviors, attitudes, values, and dispositions that the institution asserts it develops? (p. 2)

The first chapter, Developing a Collective Institutional Commitment, is, as many first steps are, the largest.   There must be an institutional commitment to collaborate and devote a great deal of time to the processes involved in creating a "culture of inquiry," providing forums for stakeholders to talk about teaching and learning across the institution.  The second chapter, Beginning With Dialogue About Teaching and Learning, provides recommendations and structures for coordinating the necessary discussions of expectations for learning among the participants.

A useful feature of the book is that Maki provides lists of references, "meta-site" urls, and institutional examples of implementation of the processes she recommends.  One particularly useful example is the "leveled outcome statements" from Azusa Pacific University: the "Undergraduate Outcomes for the School of Nursing, the University Mission to Level Competencies"  (pp. 81-83).  It begins with the University Mission Statement, School of Nursing Mission Statement, the School of Nursing Program Learner Outcome statement, and the Program Competencies.  At the first level in each Competency, students need to describe important items and concepts; in order to achieve higher levels they must be able to integrate and apply the concepts. 

The bulk of the book details the processes for developing outcome statements, designing assessment procedures and instruments, agreeing on standards for evaluation, and creating an ongoing institutional process for assessing student learning.  Other useful areas included by Maki are developing scoring rubrics; advice on statistical methods, including sampling, scoring, and inter-rater reliability; methods of analysis; presentation and use of results. 

In our faculty learning community, the program directors are effectively utilizing the structures Maki has provided to organize their assessment of how well the students they work with are learning.  It adds additional dimensions to finding out how well students are learning in classes, and it can change an entire institutional culture.