The VALUE of VALUE
By: Stephen Langendorfer
As we enter a new decade, education is still plagued by one of the more misdirected assessment initiatives of the past decade: No Child Left Behind. NCLB, unfortunately, arose from the faulty notion that simply by administering standardized tests, educational practices magically would be improved. Indeed, the most underperforming schools as measured by standardized test scores are punished and the children who need the resources the most are deprived of them.
Along the same mistaken line of accountability thinking, institutions of higher education were coerced into engaging in the misnamed Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA). The misguided idea behind VSA is that the primary focus of assessment in colleges and universities should be garnering some single standardized score by which an institution can compared to its peers. Although we know from the LEAP initiative that all institutions of higher education should share some common focus on liberal education as measured by the Essential Learning Outcomes, each institution must have its own unique mission and vision. No standardized test can come close to demonstrating the degree to which any institution is achieving its self-identified mission.
AAC&U’s VALUE rubric initiative stands as one of the few viable alternatives to VSA and NCLB. After a two-year FIPSE-funded national development process, AAC&U has published fifteen developmental rubrics that are paired with each of the Essential Learning Outcomes that arose from the LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) initiative begun in 2005 by AAC&U. After a full day pre-conference symposium on Wednesday, January 20, focused on VALUE and e-portfolios, Terry Rhodes and Wende Morgaine provided an overview of the VALUE rubric initiative on Friday, January 22, during AAC&U’s annual conference in Washington, DC.
I had some personal experience with the LEAP rubrics during their development process as a member of one of the VALUE leadership campuses, and I regularly use the rubrics for designing specific assignment rubrics. I can attest to their value as diagnostic and prescriptive assessment instruments whose purpose is not primarily oriented toward accountability, but more appropriately toward student learning and improvement. Because each rubric is constructed in the form of multiple developmental sequences, they enable both student and instructor to understand where their achievement falls along a developmental continuum, from whence they have improved and what they still need to do to continue to improve their learning. No standardized test has that power to guide learning for individuals or for institutions collectively.
I encourage readers to explore the usefulness of the VALUE rubrics for assessing individual learning artifacts, for program assessment, and for institutional evaluation. They are published in a new work, Assessing Outcomes and Improving Achievement: Tips and Tools for Using Rubrics, edited by Terrel (Terry) Rhodes, available from AAC&U. The rubrics also are available free of charge as .pdf files from the AAC&U Web site. Find the value of the VALUE rubrics.
Stephen Langendorfer is director of the BG Perspective (general education) program and professor of kinesiology at Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. As an associate member of AAC&U, he has participated in a Greater Expectations Institute and the VALUE rubric project.
