The National Trend Toward Assessment: The View from Undergraduate-Only Political Science Departments

1. The National Trend Toward Assessment: The View from Undergraduate-Only Political Science Departments Fletcher McClellan Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science Elizabethtown College

2. I. Political Science and the Assessment Movement: An Overview

3. The Rise of the Assessment Movement The national movement to assess student learning outcomes at the institutional, program and classroom levels emerged in the 1980s from a convergence of external and internal forces (McClellan, in Deardorff, Hamann and Ishiyama 2009) • Concerns about education accountability from politicians • Ideas from academics about raising the priority of teaching, finding ways to reform the undergraduate curriculum, and improving the quality of instruction • Outcomes assessment emerged as a policy alternative that satisfied both the accountability and improvement camps • Led by the Reagan administration, states, SACS, North Central, and some early pioneers (Alverno, Truman State, University of Tennessee), nearly all colleges and universities claimed to be developing assessment plans by the early 1990s

4. Political Science and the Assessment Movement in the 1980s:Blissful Unawareness “While it is understandable that a professor may care little for the idea of measuring outcomes, it is much more difficult to understand how political scientists could be ignorant of such a massive educational and political movement.” - Julian, Chamberlain and Seay in PS: Political Science and Politics 1991)

5. Political Science and Assessment in the 1990s: The AAC/APSA Wahlke Report (1991) • Goal of a political science major should “maximize students’ capacity to analyze and interpret the significance and dynamics of political events and governmental processes” • Undergraduate curriculum should be structured, sequenced and culminate with a senior seminar or equivalent capstone experience • Departments should (a) define goals and standards students should reach, emphasizing the “coherence and interconnectedness of their knowledge and their analytic ability in dealing with new problems and situations” (b) devise or acquire instruments to measure student progress against benchmarks and (c) “evaluate the evaluation process and results regularly and update it frequently”

6. Assessment and Political Science Faculty in the 1990s: Interest in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Grows Exponentially • APSA establishes Teaching and Learning division in the early 1990s; an organized section on Undergraduate Education (now Political Science Education) forms in 1997 • APSA annual meeting panels on teaching scholarship, some of which focus on assessment, grow from 0 in 1991 to 5 in 1994 to an average of 17 in 1998-2001 • SoTL articles in PS and other journals, papers and short courses by political scientists in 1998-2001 increase 6x over SoTL activity in 1990-97 (Kehl 2002)

7. Assessment and Political Science Departments in the 1990s: Program Assessment Proceeds Gradually • APSA organizes department chair sessions on program and/or classroom assessment in 1993, 1996-99 • A 2000 survey of PS departments by Kelly and Klunk (2003) shows over ½ of undergraduate-only departments and 45% of departments offering graduate programs were involved at some stage of developing assessment programs

8. Political Science and Assessment in the 2000s: An Institutional Framework for Teaching and Learning Emerges • APSA establishes the annual Teaching and Learning Conference in 2004 – The assessment track has drawn the largest number of participants in most years • The Political Science Education section of APSA launches the Journal of Political Science Education in 2005, provides short courses on assessment • Publication of Deardorff, Hamann and Ishiyama, eds., Assessment in Political Science (2009)

9. Assessment and Political Science Faculty in the 2000s: Scholarship on Assessment Continues • Increased opportunities for publication • Nearly 60 papers on assessment at APSA, ISA, MPSA and WPSA meetings since 2004 • Establishment of teaching and learning centers at many colleges and universities, providing assessment tools to graduate students and faculty

10. Assessment and Political Science Departments in the 2000s: The Movement Fully Joined Assessment Is a Fact of Life – How Can We Make It Work for Our Students and Us?

11. II. Political Science and Assessment: The View from Undergraduate-Only Institutions

12. Undergraduate Political Science Departments and SoTL • Faculty from undergraduate-only institutions – mainly small colleges and regional universities, both public and private – have generally been more receptive and involved in SoTL, finding greater opportunities to publish in PS and JPSE • UGs have been enthusiastic participants in the APSA TLC and are well-represented in the Political Science Education section of APSA. The discipline’s greater emphasis on teaching and learning has given them a stronger voice in the profession.

13. Undergraduate Political Science Departments and the Priority of Teaching • UGs are more likely to place a higher priority on successful teaching, though many if not most have adopted the teacher-scholar model • UGs are more likely to recognize SoTL, as described in Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered, in tenure and promotion decisions, and use assessment data as evidence of successful teaching

14. Undergraduate Political Science Departments and Assessment • Departments at UGs, which tend to have smaller student populations, are more likely than departments at larger, graduate-degree institutions to use “external” assessment techniques such as comprehensive examinations, exit interviews, portfolio analyses, alumni surveys, and capstone experiences, which require greater faculty effort outside the classroom (Ishiyama 2009). • Departments at UGs tend to gain more and different benefits from assessment – not just increasing student learning or using assessment results to secure greater resources (faculty lines, budgets, etc.). Smaller departments may also be able to achieve greater faculty and faculty-student collaboration and a sense of community.

15. Assessment at Elizabethtown College • Known around campus as dysfunctional, our six-member department used a “mission-based” process of building an assessment program (Deardorff and Folger 2005, 2009) in 2001-02 to define goals, objectives, and student learning outcomes. • We revised our curriculum to provide earlier and more frequent research experiences, promote experiential learning, and utilize our senior seminar as a tool to assess intellectual development and identify the most important learning experiences in the major. • We also modified standard professional expectations for faculty and instituted a multi-faceted program of peer review. • We were better able to recruit and retain majors, received an additional faculty line, and collaborated more often with each other and students on joint projects (McClellan 2005).

16. III. The Future of Assessment and Political Science

17. Practical Challenges for Faculty and Departments: Assessment as a “Perpetual Movement” Unlike social movements, the assessment movement has neither faded away as a fad nor become institutionalized (Ewell 2006) • How to create a “culture of assessment” in which assessment is integrated into faculty life • How assessment activities can be embedded in practice, not an “add-on” • How to align departmental and disciplinary learning goals and objectives with institutional goals • Move from issues of how to establish an assessment program (program development) to how to use assessment to improve program effectiveness (program implementation, evaluation, impact, and feedback) • How to confront ongoing and, in light of the grim economic and budgetary climate, new challenges to developing an effective assessment program, in terms of resources and incentives

18. Challenges for the Profession: Promoting Profession-Wide Discussion • Assessment practice and scholarship has moved from individual faculty activities to the departmental level, but much of the conversation has been limited to UG departments • UGs and large, research institutions have different missions, professional incentives, and resources, but a common interest in successful teaching and student learning can narrow the gap

19. Challenges for the Profession: Time to Revisit the Wahlke Report? • The Wahlke Report has had limited impact on the undergraduate PS curriculum (Ishiyama 2005), though its structural recommendations appear to have a positive impact on student knowledge and reasoning skills (Ishiyama and Hartlaub 2003) • What has the last decade of intense SoTL activity told us about what political science students should know, value, and be able to do? Do we have greater clarity or confusion about the goals and objectives of political science education? Knowledge vs. skills? Breadth vs. depth? The role of civic engagement? • To what extent have classroom and program assessment efforts been hampered by the absence of standards? Is a standards-based education in political science possible? Is it desirable?

20. Challenges for the Profession: Promoting Profession-Wide Deliberation • How can APSA construct an effective “bottom-up” process that can tap into the knowledge and understanding of teaching and learning gained through classroom, program, and institutional assessment activities? • Can the profession identify the unique contribution of political science to liberal learning? How can we make a case that what we do is essential, not optional to a liberal education?

21. Challenges for the Profession: Engagement with Governmental and Accreditation Bodies Achieving greater clarity and consensus about outcomes assessment in political science should strengthen our discipline’s hand in dealing with Spellings-like external mandate proposals, shaping rather than reacting to the national discussion on assessment

22. “If political science does not govern its own discipline with respect to assessment, someone else will” - Axel, et.al., 2006 APSA TLC Track Summary in PS (2006)