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UNDERSTANDING ASSESSMENT
Moving from Paperwork to Pedagogy:
Channeling Intellectual Curiosity
into a Commitment to Assessment
Peggy Maki
American Association of Higher Education
This article poses some key questions that help promote faculty ownership
of assessment activities on their campuses:
- What kinds of understanding, abilities, dispositions, habits of mind,
an ways of thinking, knowing, and problem solving do faculty members believe
students should achieve by the time they graduate?…How do faculty members build on one another’s work to ensure that student have ample opportunity to develop institutional and programmatic learning outcomes?
- What evidence would document students’ progress towards those
expectations, and how could that evidence be captured so that faculty members
could learn about patterns of student achievement to inform pedagogy and curriculum?
- How do educational experiences outside the classroom complement and
contribute to expected learning outcomes?…What do the curricular and
other educational experiences “add up to”?
- Given the diversity of students in higher education, including their
experiences and learning histories, which students benefit from which teaching
strategies, educational experiences, or educational processes believed to
be responsible for contributing to expected student learning and development?
- What assumptions about teaching and learning underlie how faculty
members teaching in a discipline? What assumptions about assessment methods underlie when and how faculty members assess their students’ learning? How are methods of assessment aligned with content, pedagogy, and instructional design to deepen students’ learning to foster transference of knowledge and abilities to new situations?

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