ABSTRACT:
Higher education campus leaders face a complex state of affairs regarding the documentation of evidence of student learning. There is no shortage of technical guidance for conducting assessment (e.g. Allen, 2006; Bresciani, 2007; Bresciani, Zelna, & Anderson, 2004; Lui, 2011; Maki, 2010; Suskie, 2009; Walvrood & Anderson, 2010), and a great deal of energy and resources are expended gathering, analyzing, interpreting, disseminating, and using data generated through this methodological advice. Yet, the advancement of assessment methods has outpaced explorations of assessment’s philosophy and discourses of how assessment and campus cultures are changed have been slow to emerge. In essence, the art and science of assessment are divided and, as Snow (1959) cautions, “when those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom” (p. 29). As higher education places greater emphasis on empirical data from standardized learning, research regarding why assessment is conducted, how it is leveraged for change, and the ramifications of assessment’s purposes must be elevated to a more meaningful level. To this end a new instrument—The Survey of Assessment Culture © — was developed to explore factors and strategies influencing the cultivation of cultures of assessment. The Survey supports research and dialogue into cultures of assessment and how assessment emerges as an accepted institutional way of existence. This article reviews the methodological approaches used in the study, shares basic descriptive statistics, and concludes by discussing various implications for the study of assessment cultures and for administrative practice in higher education and educational administration preparation programs. Full Text Journal attached on Front Page in PDF (subscription or NCPEA Member ONLY)