Assessment, assessment, and assessment; this seems to be all I am hearing these days. Editors at academic journals inform me that if I have an article on assessment, they would be happy to publish it… Even my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher had a meeting to explain to the parents how our 7 year olds would be assessed over the school year. In my new position as Deputy Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, I am currently overseeing two major assessments: one of the Institute’s programs and another of student writing in CICs. Surprisingly I find myself enjoying it immensely.

As assessment seems to be the 21st century companion to the education field I guess it is time to just jump in. I find myself fascinated and passionate about looking at and assessing students’ writing over a ten-year period and all of its infinite possibilities. However there is a small part of me that feels there is a fine line that is frequently crossed in assessment. It is when educational institutions, or even individual educators, over-invest in the assessment of whether students attain pre-established learning goals to demonstrate that students have learned. When student outcomes, in relation to pre-set learning goals, are the main goal of an assessment, outcomes can easily become the dominant product of education rather than the messy but profound experience of learning itself, which does not always produce a clear outcome. And if this becomes the assessment norm, to measure outcomes rather than transformative experience, than education runs the risk of merely accumulating material and compromising its fundamental role. This is a line I feel is dangerous for any educator to cross.

Ken Buckman, professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, wrote in the fall issue of Thought and Action that, “the primary character of education is its transformative influence…” Therefore, experiencing the process of learning is as important if not more than the final goal of having attained an acceptable outcome or learning goal. Yet this is one of the hardest areas of learning to assess: the transformative experience.

However, there might be a way of examining student learning as a process and not an outcome. Follow the same students for several years and see what parts of their learning process have become integrated into the way they talk or write. In a sub-sample set of the written diagnostic data we are now examining the same set of students writing over a period of 3-4 years. Their vocabulary, their expectations and the complexity with which they express themselves can be analyzed as well as how this has been transformed over time. This data will not tell us whether the students did well on the final exam or whether they were able to write an “A” term paper. But we might be able to note when and if the student was going through a transformative process between the times they started writing in their first CIC course and the 3rd or 4th CIC.

There is no doubt that any educational institution needs to be able to demonstrate that its students on an aggregate level are reaching the goals and outcomes that have been put forth. However, students should also be studied as distinctive learners with unique goals and experiences. As for my part, I can’t get enough of knowing that my students might have been transformed.