Peter Ewell's Assessment, Accountability, and Improvements: Revisiting the Tension

This paper was incredibly helpful!
I think the table on page 8 of this article is a great way to see the difference between viewing "Accountability Paradigm" and the "Improvement Paradigm".
This paper does an excellent job of explaining the sources of the tension between the two paradigms.
The best part of this paper for me began on page 14 -- "Managing the Tension" Here some ideas Ewell gives us for doing this:
1. "Setting learning objectives rests with the institutions themselves. See assessment as part of our accountability to ourselves – like researches embrace peer review to maintain scholarly integrity."
2. "Show action on the results of assessment." Ewell points out that our competitive position is slipping internationally. He suggests that we need to be ready to report actual learning outcomes in comparative or benchmarked forms as well as being transparent about internal efforts for continuous improvement. He admonishes us to close the loop on assessment results. He gives some tricks of the trade to use assessment for improvement – think about this as a part of the design in the beginning (page 16 --I think those Suskie questions in Chapter 4 might helps us here!) We need to craft specific questions that we want answers to!!! What do we expect the data to reveal? What might be the action that we take as consequences of this or that result? He suggests that we also consider disaggregation of the results for specific populations or outcomes dimensions (this might be too much to hope for on our first attempt but as we get better, we will want to think about this one). He advises us to create concrete opportunities for faculty to look at the results together and discuss what the data mean and consider the action implications (We are going to do this 8/17/10). He tells us that the learning objectives must be inescapable – on syllabi, in catalogues, and visible in the criteria that faculty use to assign grades. This one definitely needs some attention...
3. "Emphasize assessment at transition points in the students’ college careers. Exit tests out of DS. Assessment at the conclusion of a Program (degree)" -- we are doing this -- yea!!!
4. "Embed assessment in the regular curriculum. Assignments need to be carefully designed to elicit responses appropriate for consistent scoring, scoring rubrics need to be developed that yield reliable ratings across graders, and a mechanism needs to be in place to assemble and store the artifacts themselves." We are going to work on this one!

Lots of wonderful ideas for balancing the tension!