Best of Both Worlds: Leveraging ACCELERATE Principles to Elevate Applied Practice and Scholarship

This response advocates for assessment’s legitimized disciplinary development via practitioner scholarship by identifying, then synthesizing the tension between the “Enduring and Evolving” ACCELERATE Principle and the “Action-Driven” and “Learning-Centered” ACCELERATE Principles. The ACCELERATE Principles’ publication is a step in the overall growth of assessment as a discipline, however, for assessment to continue to meet the “Enduring and Evolving” call for versatile applicability, it must achieve the perception of legitimacy among its stakeholders. This legitimacy requires both pragmatic applicability and participation in knowledge production ecosystems. The “Learning-Centered” and “Action-Driven” ACCELERATE Principles emphasize context-specificity, which might limit the production of scalable assessment knowledge via research, therefore potentially limiting field-level legitimacy. Comparing two analogous disciplines: Discipline-Based Education Research and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning through the Organizational Legitimacy Framework, this manuscript explores assessment’s growth toward disciplinary legitimacy using examples from sociology and urges practitioners to build a discipline where assessment honors its context while enduring.