What Can WASC Do To Increase Faculty

Engagement?
Pat Hutchings
October 2010

In April 2010, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment released a commissioned paper I
prepared entitled “Opening Doors to Faculty Involvement in Assessment.” As that paper argues, faculty
involvement is among the most enduring themes of the higher education assessment movement--a kind of
gold standard widely understood to as the key to assessment’s impact “on the ground” where teachers and
students meet. It is also one of the most vexing and persistent challenges, as reaffirmed by a 2009 national
survey of provosts who reported--some twenty-five years into the assessment movement--that increased
faculty engagement remains the most pressing challenge to further progress on their campuses (Kuh and
Ikenberry, 2009).

In this spirit, I have been asked to prepare a supplement to the NILOA paper, outlining “what WASC can
do to promote and deepen faculty engagement with student learning and student success.” The purpose of
what follows is not to lay out a cohesive or comprehensive strategy but to put possibilities on the table in
the hopes that they will contribute to a next round of reflection and deliberation as part of a larger WASC
review. That is my intention here: to lay out possibilities--some rather general and conceptual, some per-
haps overly concrete, a few probably not possible, and several, I hope, reinforcing the many good things that
WASC is already doing.

CHALLENGES

For starters it should be said that faculty have played significant roles in assessment on many campuses. In
suggesting that the faculty role needs to be increased and deepened, it is important not to forget or to mini-
mize the good work that faculty have already done--and indeed to celebrate and build on that work. At the
same time, it’s important to understand why faculty engagement has been and continues to be a challenge. It
is not, certainly, that professors do not care about their students.

Assessment arrived on the higher education scene with a mixed history. On the one hand, it was seen, and
advocated, as an essential ingredient in teaching and learning--for instance, and perhaps most notably, in the
1984 National Institute of Education report Involvement in Learning, which identifies assessment as one of
three conditions for excellence in undergraduate education. In this sense, assessment arrived with a powerful
educational pedigree. But from its earliest days, assessment also attracted attention from outside of academe.
In 1986 the National Governors Association (NGA) embraced the idea in a report tellingly entitled Time
for Results. A key figure in this development was Governor John Ashcroft of Missouri, whose state motto,
“Show Me,” captured the tone of policy makers tired of what they saw as higher education’s sense of entitle-
ment, and asking for proof of effectiveness. Further, as Peter Ewell points out, assessment was, from those
earliest days, “consciously separated from what went on in the classroom,” and especially from grading, as
part of an effort to promote “objective” data gathering (2009, p. 19). Attempting to respond to policy makers

This is one of a series of concept papers commissioned by the WASC Accrediting Commission for Senior
Colleges and Universities, to inform the development of its 2012-2020 Handbook of Accreditation.
and external mandates, many campuses felt they had no choice but to employ external tests and instruments
that kept assessment distinct from the regular work of faculty as facilitators and judges of student learning.
In short, the impediments to faculty involvement have firm roots in assessment’s early history.

Further impediments appear in the culture of academe itself, and these are well known.

Faculty are not trained in assessment. Put simply, graduate education aims to develop scholarly expertise in
one’s field. While forward-looking doctoral programs are now beginning to treat teaching as a more promi-
nent part of professional formation, it remains true that reflecting on educational purposes, formulating
learning goals, designing assignments and exams, and using data for improvement are activities that live, if
at all, only on the far margins of most Ph.D. students’ experience. Nor has assessment had a central place in
professional development experiences for faculty. In short, there has been no ready way for most faculty to
learn about assessment.

The work of assessment has also been an uneasy match with faculty reward systems. It is important not to
overgeneralize here. On some campuses, particularly those where teaching is the central mission, assessment
has been valued as part of the faculty role, either as an aspect of teaching or as institutional service. In many
higher education settings, however, assessment, like teaching more generally, has been undervalued or invis-
ible in promotion and tenure deliberations, a circumstance that has certainly not encouraged faculty to see
assessment as their work.

It may be, too, that faculty have not yet seen sufficient evidence that assessment makes a difference. There’s
a chicken-and- egg dynamic at work here; more faculty involvement would presumably make a bigger dif-
ference. But the fact remains that the benefits of assessment are uncertain. Indeed, assessment is seen as
“redundant” on many campuses, duplicating already existing processes and not yielding additional benefits
(Kuh & Ikenberry, 2009, p. 9). Similarly, in the 2009 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, 75 percent
of respondents indicated that their campuses were involved in assessment “quite a bit” or “very much,” but
only about a third had positive views of the dissemination and usefulness of assessment findings (National
Survey of Student Engagement, 2009, pp. 21–22). Faculty might be readier to engage with assessment if its
benefits were easier to see.

And finally (though no doubt this list could be longer yet), there’s the “full plate problem.” Ironically, some
of the developments intended to make faculty life more rewarding and to bring recognition to a wider range
of work—including teaching—have put additional pressures on faculty. Gene Rice notes, “In a small way,
the success of Scholarship Reconsidered has contributed to the sense of having more responsibilities added
to a full plate. In a tight labor market in which the standards for tenure are being continually ratcheted up,
and each individual is evaluated on the basis of performance in all four forms of scholarship simultaneously,
the faculty career is becoming less attractive and increasingly regarded as hardly tenable, certainly not the
kind of career that could attract the best of a new generation” (2005, p. 310). With escalating expectations,
there’s simply too much to do: not a context in which engagement with assessment is going to feel like a
viable option for most faculty.

This last point is an especially important one for any serious effort to increase faculty engagement with as-
sessment and student learning. When individual faculty say “I don’t have time,” it sounds like a gripe, like
whining. But, in fact, the full plate problem is a systemic issue that bears not only on assessment but, as
Rice’s comment suggests, on the future of higher education much more generally. I have not included atten-
tion to this problem among the possibilities below (because it’s more of a “meta challenge” than one specific
to assessment), but it is an area in which WASC could bravely step forward and take leadership, perhaps,
first, by raising the issue as a legitimate concern, and inviting candid conversation.

POSSIBILITIES

1. Think about language. In thinking about what WASC could do, I would flip back to the beginning of
this document, to listen again to Ralph Wolff’s question about how WASC can “promote and deeper faculty
engagement with student learning and student success.” The phrase is worth pausing over. Clearly assess-
ment is implied, but it is not “the headline.” The emphasis is on the goal, not the process; the end, not the
means. What’s needed, after all, is not more faculty involvement in assessment but more and better student
learning--and though there are huge challenges in the latter, it may also be an easier thing for people to em-
brace. The language of learning carries high regard for faculty in many settings today; indeed, talking about
teaching (let alone assessment) without talking about learning has become a kind of anathema.

Thinking about language and framing is important, too, because for many faculty the language of assess-
ment is and has been especially unwelcoming, associated with a group of actors outside academe and there-
fore someone else’s agenda, and easily seen as part of “the management culture” (Walvoord, 2004, p. 7)
rather than as a process at the heart of faculty’s work and interactions with students.

To be sure, there are some for whom the language of assessment has become a positive rallying point, a
common bond. It has its place. But WASC might take a look at language vis a vis different audiences.
Clearly the terms employed send powerful signals about who is and is not included. By way of example: I
note the language of “campus professionals” in several assessment missives on the WASC web site—and
that language makes perfect sense in the context. But it might be worth asking what “regular” faculty make
of it.

2. Take stock in ways that stimulate conversation. Just about everyone agrees that expanding the faculty
role in assessment would be a good thing, but in truth the extent of faculty involvement is difficult to know-
-and the danger of self-fulfilling prophecy should be kept in mind. In fact, WASC might take the lead in ex-
ploring more systematically where, how, and how much faculty are involved. Provosts are often surveyed,
and they have reported insufficient involvement. Maybe it’s time to hear more faculty voices, especially if
assessment is to be seen not as a self-standing process but as an integral part of the teaching and learning
process--and therefore not always so easy to see “from the top,” or to name.

One strategy might be a WASC faculty survey. Surveys are hard to do well, and the results often do nothing
more than sit on a shelf. But perhaps there are ways to get the work done well and efficiently, and to use the
results to start important conversations. Might graduate students in higher education programs take a lead
in survey design and administration, working with a task force of faculty from across the WASC region?
Might WASC conferences be settings to explore the findings? In musing about this possibility, I think of
a 1990 survey designed by Syracuse University (and then used on 46 additional campuses) looking at the
relative weight given to teaching and research. Three groups were surveyed--faculty, chairs, and deans--and
all three said that teaching should be given more weight but that others did not share that belief. That’s great
grist for a conversation. Might there be a parallel effort around assessment?

A different stocktaking strategy is suggested by a 2001-2003 AAHE project (also on faculty roles and
rewards) in which participating campuses committed to studying the effects of changes in the definition of
scholarship--and to do so through in-depth interviews with faculty. The resulting case studies are collected
in O’Meara and Rice (2005), and what they confirm is that knowing the experience of the local community
in much greater depth is powerful stuff—and that the very process of asking the questions changes people’s
perceptions and attitudes. Perhaps a similar process could be turned on the topic of assessment, with a small
number of campuses working under WASC’s umbrella, sharing findings and protocols so others could un-
dertake the process as well.

3. Expect and value efforts of varied kinds and at different levels. As noted above, one of the impedi-
ments to greater faculty involvement in assessment is the lack of rewards. This is starting to change, as
campuses redefine their conceptions of scholarship and begin to make a place for a wider range of faculty
work, particularly around pedagogy--and including assessment. WASC should continue to exert whatever
pressure it can in these directions, looking for campuses to align mission with rewards systems.

But short of this kind of transformation, WASC might also look for ways to make the assessment work that
faculty already do in their own classrooms and programs more visible and valued as part of the self-study
process and the campus visit. (One of the things that strikes me as I listen to campuses talk about assess-
ment and accreditation is that much of the good work that goes on is seen as irrelevant.) Growing numbers
of faculty on all kinds of campuses are now beginning to treat their classrooms as sites for inquiry, explor-
ing their students’ learning, and using what they discover to redesign teaching and curriculum. Such work
comes in the form (and language) of course portfolios, faculty inquiry, classroom research, and, increasingly,
the scholarship of teaching and learning (a broader umbrella term--at least as I use it--which encompasses all
of these.

Such work also comes in very different shapes and sizes. It may be less grand than what is understood by
most when they hear the word “assessment”: small scale, modest at first, as faculty wade into work that is,
after all, new to them. Methods vary by discipline and often look quite different from those employed by
the assessment office or institutional research. But the focus is squarely on student learning and improve-
ment, and in this sense--whatever the language, scale, scope, or methods--this work is a route to deeper
engagement with student learning and student success for those who perhaps would not be drawn to assess-
ment but feel welcomed by the idea of seeing their teaching and their students’ learning as sites for scholarly
inquiry.

Indeed, a 2009 survey of campuses participating in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning (CASTL) indicates that such work, even when involving relatively small numbers of faculty,
brings greater energy and openness to institutional assessment activities. Departments where faculty have
been engaged in inquiry into the students’ experience understand learning outcomes better because “they
have assessed student learning in their classrooms,” survey respondents reported, and are “noticeably less
hostile to institutional assessment” (Ciccone, Huber, Hutchings, & Cambridge, 2009, p. 9)

So, what might WASC do? For starters, I hope it will continue to talk about and promote the scholarship of
teaching and learning. CASTL has ended; could WASC be an umbrella for such work in the region? At the
least, WASC can encourage and stimulate bridge-building conversations between campus assessment and
scholarship of teaching and learning communities, which are often located (physically and metaphorically)
in different places but bring overlapping goals for learning and student success to the table.

More generally, WASC standards and processes can validate a wide range of assessment activities, at multi-
ple levels, and by whatever name, as valued parts of the campus’s attention to student learning. Perhaps an
option for campus visits might include a symposium featuring faculty who are studying innovations in their
own classrooms. Such occasions would highlight that value of such work, counter the notion that assess-
ment necessarily means high levels of aggregation (and/or standardized instruments), and--as an additional
benefit--give campus administrators a chance to hear about such work in greater detail—and to see its value
in a high-stakes occasion like accreditation.

4. Cultivate multi-campus inquiry and improvement networks. As scholars, faculty expect (and are
expected) to share their work with peers beyond the campus who can review, critique, strengthen, and build
on it. Yet assessment has tended to be a local, campus-based function. Thus, one might ask: Could WASC
help to give assessment a more cosmopolitan dimension—one that would therefore have greater appeal to
faculty?

The kinds of developments noted in the previous item--growing numbers of faculty exploring learning in
their own settings and working to improve it--present an opportunity in this regard, especially since such
work is clearly strengthened when faculty join forces with colleagues interested in similar learning goals and
issues. In this spirit, two kinds of themes come to mind as possible centers of gravity for network building.

First are themes--like critical thinking or problem solving--that are generally recognized as critical to stu-
dent success today, already prominent in WASC’s guidelines, and that span a wide spectrum of disciplines.
Clearly there are faculty on many WASC campuses interested in, and already studying and working on out-
comes like these. WASC could bring them together, face-to-face and virtually, to share problems, methods,
and findings, and to translate local efforts into broader terms that travel more easily from setting to setting.
The emphasis could be not only on generating evidence but also on using it.

Second are discipline-specific themes (about the learning of mathematics, for example or sociology), a
context that is perhaps more likely to generate interest among faculty who do not see themselves as teach-
ing/learning/assessment experts—and likely as well to make a difference not only at the classroom level but
in the department or program as well. Some fields have already established an impressive track record in
this regard. I think of Project Kaleidoscope in the STEM fields, of the International Society of Scholars of
Teaching and Learning History, and of discipline-based learning communities at Indiana University where
faculty work through a series of steps focused on identifying and eliminating roadblocks to the learning of
their field. (David Pace or Joan Middendorf (2004), from Indiana, would be great WASC conference speak-
ers.)

On either model, assessment would be a central activity but would not, presumably, need to be the “head-
line.” Again, there are certainly faculty within the WASC area who would welcome a chance to organize
and even to lead such groups. If CASTL’s experience is any clue, what’s most needed from an organization
like WASC is not so much staff or financial support (both difficult, I would imagine) but visibility and a
sense of affiliation.

5. Explore and support the role of teaching and learning centers. WASC has been a significant force
in helping campuses begin to develop a culture of evidence and an infrastructure for assessment (one of the
topics, I note, included in the Assessment II offering). No doubt the infrastructure takes different shapes in
different settings, involving IR capacity, a central assessment office, an assessment committee, links with
planning, and so forth. Would it be useful to ask: where do teaching and learning centers, which are now in
place on many campuses, fit in to this mix?

Early in the higher education assessment movement most campus teaching centers kept such work (or at
least such language) at arm’s length, wary of confusing their role as supporter and helper with an enter-
prise associated with evaluation, administration, and accountability. But increasingly there are signs of
rapprochement as centers look for ways to give themselves and their activities a more central place in the
institution. Taking up the assessment agenda can be part of this shift, and in fact many centers today
promote and support a wide range of activities that are in one sense or another “assessment’ but may not be
recognized as such. Ed Nuhfer, a long-time leader in the faculty development community, notes that “col-
lege leaders too often lack a strong sense of how to use teaching centers to complement the work of their
campuses’ assessment programs” (quoted in Glenn, 2009).

WASC could take the lead in exploring what roles teaching and learning centers now play in campus as-
sessment activities, what roles they might play in the future, and in ensuring that they are part of the larger
assessment discussion on campus. Perhaps this is a topic for a WASC commissioned paper, a discussion
group topic at a conference, a thread in the Assessment II retreats—or all of these.

6. Reconnect assessment to the practices of grading and feedback. Assessment is a big word that covers
a lot of ground, and it may be hard for faculty--even those disposed to do so--to figure out how to engage,
and where they could make a contribution. With this in mind, I would propose two related themes as pos-
sible starting points.

The first is grading--a practice, as noted earlier, from which assessment originally distanced itself, but one
that a courageous accreditation community might now revisit as a route to greater faculty engagement and
impact on student learning. Grading is, after all, something that virtually all faculty do on a regular basis.
Barbara Walvoord has done important work on this front (in her 2004 book on assessment, for instance), and
she has powerful things to say about how to make grading a more valid, reliable, and meaningful practice-
-one that can contribute to careful thinking by faculty, and also by students, about knowledge and skills,
course and assignment design, issues of quality, and what counts as evidence: a pretty good list of precisely
the things assessment most needs to shape if more and better student learning is the goal.

Grading would also open up a focus on a second theme, feedback, which should be central to assessment
(the 1984 NIE report called not only for assessment but for feedback to learners) but seems not to get much
attention. Some fields--composition studies most notably--have made this an area of important research
and practice, but in general the topic seems to me wide open for more careful thinking and innovation. Such
work would seem to appeal to faculty, many of whom spend significant amounts of time providing feedback
to students--some of it useful, some not, and some downright deleterious--and would presumably welcome
the chance to find ways to make their efforts both more effective and more efficient.

The topic of feedback seems especially fertile since it goes to the problem of “use,” another of the perennial
themes and vexations of the assessment movement: having lots of data that no one cares about. It might be
explored at the classroom level but also beyond. What kinds and forms of data, under what conditions, lead
to change at the classroom level, the program level, and the institutional level?

WASC might provide an initial catalyst for such work--a special session at a conference, say, perhaps some
seed money for a meeting or two, resources on the website, and so forth. With a little nudge, campus teach-
ing and learning centers might then adopt the topic and move ahead in more local ways.

7. Involve students. One of the recommendations in the original NILOA paper is to involve students in as-
sessment. Campuses, that is, can invite students into conversations about, planning for, and implementation
of assessment. Many have done so, at least in modest ways, and experiences like those at Western Wash-
ington University and Elon University illustrate possible approaches (creating institutional structures where
teachers and students can talk together about learning, for instance, and involving students in curricular
review and redesign) and their benefits (see Werder and Otis, 2010). Of course WASC can show interest in
and value the involvement of students on individual campuses. But is there something beyond that?

Frankly, I’m not sure. My instinct, however, is to think about this question as concretely as possible. That
is, involving students is in general a good thing--in part because students have a way of capturing the com-
mitment of faculty. But what’s needed is careful thinking about where and how, exactly, students can both
add value to and benefit from participation in activities like those listed above.

8. Bring faculty into the larger conversation about educational quality. The above items are aimed in
large part at bringing the process of assessment more fully into alignment with the way faculty work, think,
and talk, making it more integral to the everyday routines of teaching and learning. Doing so is a necessary
condition for involving more faculty more fully in the ongoing improvement of student learning and suc-
cess. But something else is needed as well.

As documented in Peter Ewell’s “new ecology” paper, the ground is shifting under higher education. Insti-
tutions are being called upon to bring many more students to much higher levels of achievement, and the
calls are coming from every direction: the White House, government funding agencies, philanthropic foun-
dations, education organizations, policy makers, college and university presidents, faculty senates… And
in concert with these calls come a variety of new ideas, models, and initiatives: tuning, qualification frame-
works, competency-based models, the unbundling of faculty roles, common standards, and more.

Given the multiple pressures and demands on faculty today — the full-plate problem — it is tempting to
think of this larger conversation and effort around educational expectations and standards as something for
campus administrative leaders to follow and manage. But if faculty are to embrace the imperative to re-
double attention to student learning, they too need opportunities to learn about and engage with this larger
conversation — understanding how the realities of teaching and learning are changing, what responses hold
promise, and what’s at stake — for students, faculty, institutions, society, and the academic profession.

What WASC might do, then, is to create opportunities for faculty to educate themselves about the national,
and, indeed, international conversation about educational standards and quality today. Concretely, these
might include faculty reading groups, discussion papers and seminars, conference speakers and sessions,
attendance at national and international meetings, and participation in larger multi-campus initiatives (think,
for instance, of Lumina’s project on tuning). Understanding the need to do things differently requires a
frame of reference broader than the campus, and WASC can play a role in helping faculty develop that larger
perspective.

*********

WASC has been a leader in the accreditation world and in higher education more generally when it comes
to integrating assessment into institutional life and work. Its work has helped to make the idea of a culture
of evidence a reality, embodied in ongoing practices, policies, and infrastructure. I know I will not be alone
in looking forward to WASC’s next steps in this arena, and I hope that some of the possibilities sketched
out above will strike a WASC chord. I would welcome a chance to talk about them with WASC leaders and
members. Good luck with your work.
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