Editor’s Note

My ninth and final volume of the journal! Serving as editor of a scholarly journal is a privilege, and I am grateful to the New England Educational Assessment Network (NEEAN) for supporting my work, to my former coeditors, Craig Pepin and Mark Nicholas, for their collegiality, and to the exceptional people of Pennsylvania State University Press for everything. I am also grateful to the founding editor, Richard “Dick” Gerber, and to my immediate predecessor, George Peffer, for the stage they set for this work. And, of course, I am grateful to Natasha Jankowski for taking up the challenge of being the next editor. Most of all, I am grateful to all the authors who have entrusted me with their work over the years.I am first a professor, and the work of a professor is a mix of teaching, scholarship, and service. Editing a scholarly journal is often seen as falling into that third category, but as an editor, I would argue that it is thoroughly in the category of scholarship, from two perspectives. First, scholarship is about learning taken up by the scholar, and I have learned so much from the authors and from their work. Years ago, when I applied for tenure, I was asked to provide acceptance rates from the journals where I had published my work. The editor of one journal said that he could not identify the acceptance rate because his goal as editor was to help the authors of submitted work to improve their work to the point of being published. That has been my philosophy as well, and I often found myself deeply engaged with the scholarship submitted to the journal. Second, the real scholarly privilege of the gatekeeping role of editor is that deciding what to publish shapes the scholarly literature and the particular field. I am proud of the work that has been published during my tenure as editor, and the opportunity I have had to play a role in curating the field of assessment.To that end, I am taking the opportunity of my final volume to publish an editorial (“Toward a Post-Bloom Philosophy of Assessment: Three Challenges for Practice”). As I have been learning more about assessment over the years with the journal, I have been developing some ideas about where the field has been, and where it needs to go. During my career, I have been a professor of course, but I have also been an administrator responsible for accreditation and assessment. I have attended workshops on assessment, and I have led workshops on assessment. Because my first and strongest professional identity is as a professor, however, my view of assessment is primarily through that lens. And what I see through that lens is what I want my students to get out of their education. And I have often felt a disconnect between the orientation and methods of assessment and what I think the purpose of education ultimately is. So I offer three challenges to assessment practice: First, value what professors want to achieve, even if it means measuring educational change in new ways; second, move past the mid-20th-century scientific worldview of behaviorism in understanding what learning is and develop a post-Bloom philosophy of assessment; and third, rethink what the purpose of education is and devise methods for assessing toward that purpose along with the faculty.The regular papers in this volume represent an excellent cross-section of assessment activities, from assessing individual courses to institutional objectives, from evaluating methodologies to developing new methodologies, and to using assessment to reorient institutions and potentially assessment practices generally.The first article in this volume, by Ben-Avie and colleagues, represents a melding of assessment work and scholarship by using assessment data to understand the nature, development, and antecedents of critical thinking, one of the clearest goals for higher education. They report on a longitudinal study of critical thinking, exploring what critical thinking is and how it develops in students over the course of their college career. In essence, their work demonstrates the reality that assessment work explores how education changes students—what knowledge, skills, dispositions, and so on that they acquire and develop in college. As a consequence, assessment is a way of studying human development. One of the challenges in understanding development is research design. Most assessment work involves what developmentalists call cross-sectional studies—comparing this year’s seniors with this year’s first-year students. But truly understanding change requires longitudinal designs, where students are followed throughout college and compared to their own younger selves. Ben-Avie and his colleagues have done that in their paper in this issue and have learned more than what can be learned from typical cross-sectional studies. In particular, what characteristics and experiences influence student intellectual development in college? The research presented here is a model of what assessment offices should strive for as much as possible.In keeping with the institutional effectiveness part of the journal title, two articles in this issue address ways that institutions can achieve their goals more effectively. Maldonado and Taylor explore the consequences of demographic shifts affecting higher education. As more Latino/a students enroll in colleges, institutions may find that they come to meet the definition of being a Hispanic-serving institution. Maldonado and Taylor discuss how institutions can be more intentional about that demographic shift and focus efforts toward that identity, and outline a method for using quality enhancement plans in the accreditation process as an opportunity for improving success among Hispanic students. Feldman and colleagues examine the potential disconnect between scores on the Campus Pride Index and the perception of actual support provided among LGBTQ+ students, making recommendations about how institutions could use the data they get, focusing on those most affected by it.Over the years, my coeditors and I have published a number of methodological papers, and as a methodology-focused scholar, I particularly enjoy these pieces. The next paper, by Nehrbass, describes the development of a methodology for exploring a challenging problem in assessment work. It is unreasonable, at the practical level, to assess a full curriculum map for an academic program at any point in time. The question is whether a subset map for assessment work is sufficiently informative. Nehrbass describes a sophisticated methodology for determining how representative an assessment map is of the entire curriculum map. The heartening outcome of the study is supportive of the idea that assessing a subset provides comparable information to a more laborious full assessment.Two papers explore teaching and learning at the program level. Williamson and colleagues found a way to characterize the learning objectives and pedagogies of the arts and sciences faculty by comparing the profile of learning objectives to national norms, finding that the liberal arts faculty in their university were more likely to use collaborative learning strategies, and objectives at higher Bloom’s levels. At a finer level, Dobrin and colleagues evaluated the real-world disciplinary knowledge of criminal justice students, finding that students were likely to endorse inaccurate portrayals of the criminal justice system found in the media and were unable to answer foundational questions as well as they should have as a result.Finally, two papers explore faculty engagement, a long-standing issue in assessment work (e.g., Banta, 2002). Mahlberg explored faculty engagement with assessment activities and argues for a “bottom-up” approach that encourages faculty leadership in assessment work, in which assessment practitioners learn from faculty what they are doing and encourage that activity. And likewise, Miller argues for understanding faculty priorities in teaching and learning, and their preferred modes of assessment, moving from “proving” (assessment for accountability) to “improving” (assessment for learning). In so doing, he addresses another long-standing issue in assessment work, the tension between assessment for accountability and assessment for improvement (e.g., Ewell, 2009).Again, it has been an honor, privilege, and pleasure to serve as editor for JAIE. Thank you for reading!