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What do we mean by “meaningful” assessment?
Meaningful assessment practices:
 | Enhance our academic missions in specific, practical, measurable ways, |
| Highlight accountability for student learning, |
| Are oriented toward improving the effectiveness of training and education |
| Involve the use of assessment results to shape real educational program modifications, |
| Exploit the phenomenon that students learn according to how they are assessed, |
| Allow for rational strategic planning, |
| Are ongoing, |
| Involve an appropriate balance of formative and summative assessments, and |
| Involve engaged faculty collaboration. |
Meaningful outcomes assessment programs are advantageous in that they highlight our accountability for student learning, exploit the phenomenon that students learn according to how they are assessed, allow for strategic program planning, lead to more bottom-up than top-down emphases in handling bureaucratic assessment demands, and encourage academic faculty and clinical staff members to communicate and collaborate with one another.
Meaningful assessment programs are not bureaucratic. Bureaucratic assessment programs:
| Are carried out in response to administrators’ and accreditors’ requests, |
| Involve “periodic flurries of activity” (Maki, 2002), |
| Involve select persons in leadership preparing documents to respond to assessment requirements without full consultation and collaboration with faculty and students, |
| Are not central to motivating educational program modifications (e.g., pedagogic innovation, new program development, new strategies for integrative learning, curriculum development, investment in extra- and co-curricular learning opportunities), and |
| Are episodic. |
For further information on best practices in assessment of student learning and academic programs, go to the the Assessment Forum of the American Association for Higher Education.