Assessment Clear and Simple: A Practical Guide for Institutions, Departments, and General Education

The first edition of Assessment Clear and Simple quickly became the essential go-to guide for anyone who participates in the assessment process in higher education. With the increased pressure to perform assessment to demonstrate accountability, Assessment Clear and Simple is needed more than ever. This second edition of the classic resource offers a concise, step-by-step guide that helps make assessment simple, cost-efficient, and useful to an institution. It contains effective strategies for meeting the requirements of accreditation agencies, legislatures, review boards, and others, while emphasizing and showing how to move from data to actions that improve student learning. This thoroughly revised and updated edition includes many new or expanded features, including:

• Illustrative examples drawn from the author's experience consulting with more than 350 institutions

• A basic, no-frills assessment plan for departments and for general education

• Tips on how to integrate portfolios and e-portfolios into the assessment process

• Suggestions for using rubrics and alternatives to rubrics, including doing assessment for multidisciplinary work

• Clear instructions on how to construct a coherent institution-wide assessment system and explain it to accreditors

• Ideas for assigning responsibility for general education assessment

• Strategies for gathering information about departmental assessment while keeping the departmental workload manageable

• Information on how to manage assessment in times of budgetary cutbacks

Praise for the Second Edition of Assessment Clear and Simple

"Walvoord's approach to assessment is wonderfully straightforward; it is also effective in facilitating faculty engagement in assessment. We've applied a number of her methods to our campus assessment efforts with success. This book makes assessment both manageable and useful in improving and enhancing student learning."—Martha L. A. Stassen, director of assessment, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and president, New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN)

"Walvoord's work clearly presents the basics for getting started in assessment of student learning while honestly addressing the complexities of assessment when driven by faculty passion for student learning. This book is a valuable resource for the novice as well as the developing experts who are leading their institutions in academic assessment."—Bobbi Allen, faculty assessment director, Delta College

Barbara E. Walvoord is professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She was coordinator of Notre Dame's regional accreditation self-study, the founding director of four faculty development programs– all of which have won national acclaim—and a consultant on assessment. She is the coauthor of Effective Grading, from Jossey-Bass.