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Assessment Governance: Standards, Rubrics and Self-Regulation
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2
Paper for 2
nd
Annual Conference on Teaching & Learning in Political Science
19-20 February 2005 American Political Science Association Bethesda Marriott MD Assessment Governance: Standards, Rubrics and Self-Regulation Richard R. Weiner, Rhode Island College
## email not listed ##
Karl Benziger, Rhode Island College
## email not listed ##
There has emerged a web of exogenous forces emanating from national and regional accreditation associations, particularly a satellite professional association involved in teacher preparation called the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). The reality of this web contradicts the implicit idealist sentiment in John Ishiyama’s report on the “Assessment of Student Outcomes’ meetings at the 2004 TLC where he describes “assessment as a voluntarist/bootstrapping “bottom up” effort of individual faculty members. [PS.27: 3, July 2004, 483-85.] Faculty are increasingly bombarded by outside agencies for standards inventory matrices, evaluation rubrics, and course maps. More specifically accreditors riding the circuit for the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) attack APSA as the most laggard of the discipline-based professional associations in responding to the movement for “assessment of student learning outcomes.” And as a result of benign neglect regarding this issue--rather than delegation--by the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, NCSS has created a national assessment regime that amounts to a top down process instituted by less than two handfuls of experts who not only create the standards and rubrics, but who also provide increasingly necessary consulting visits to advise history and political science faculty. Reviewing lessons learned here by American historians, this paper seeks to present reality checks in building an APSA working group on assessment of student learning outcomes. The issue of state-mandated “beginning teacher standards” in history, government, civics, social studies needs to also be considered. Emergent assessment governance processes are an application of a simplistic rational choice institutionalism bent on overcoming the embedded retarded practices discerned by the social institutionalism studies of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell). Yet scarce attention is paid to discourse and argument; in this case that of historians and political scientists in their discipline-based professional associations (e.g. AHA, APSA). In such analysis, the paper uses the approach of Günther Teubner to studying the “polycontexturality” of autonomous non-state regimes that legislate, adjudicate, and enforce: how they relate to each other; to non-state regimes like universities; and to overarching state-mandated public policy guidelines. Specifically, such an approach studies the contextual space between such regimes as a space for the collision of discourse, language games, texturalities and projects--both in terms of their intended outcomes and the feasible misunderstandings generated in their unintended consequences.
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| | Authors: Weiner, Richard. and Benziger, Karl. |
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2
Paper for 2
nd
Annual Conference on Teaching & Learning in Political Science
19-20 February 2005
American Political Science Association
Bethesda Marriott MD
Assessment Governance:
Standards, Rubrics and Self-Regulation
Richard R. Weiner, Rhode Island College
## email not listed ##
Karl Benziger, Rhode Island College
## email not listed ##
There has emerged a web of exogenous forces emanating from national and regional accreditation
associations, particularly a satellite professional association involved in teacher preparation called
the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). The reality of this web contradicts the
implicit idealist sentiment in John Ishiyama’s report on the “Assessment of Student Outcomes’
meetings at the 2004 TLC where he describes “assessment as a voluntarist/bootstrapping “bottom
up” effort of individual faculty members. [PS.27: 3, July 2004, 483-85.] Faculty are increasingly
bombarded by outside agencies for standards inventory matrices, evaluation rubrics, and course
maps.
More specifically accreditors riding the circuit for the National Council for Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE) attack APSA as the most laggard of the discipline-based
professional associations in responding to the movement for “assessment of student learning
outcomes.” And as a result of benign neglect regarding this issue--rather than delegation--by the
American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, NCSS has created
a national assessment regime that amounts to a top down process instituted by less than two
handfuls of experts who not only create the standards and rubrics, but who also provide
increasingly necessary consulting visits to advise history and political science faculty.
Reviewing lessons learned here by American historians, this paper seeks to present reality checks
in building an APSA working group on assessment of student learning outcomes. The issue of
state-mandated “beginning teacher standards” in history, government, civics, social studies needs
to also be considered.
Emergent assessment governance processes are an application of a simplistic rational choice
institutionalism bent on overcoming the embedded retarded practices discerned by the social
institutionalism studies of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell). Yet scarce attention
is paid to discourse and argument; in this case that of historians and political scientists in their
discipline-based professional associations (e.g. AHA, APSA).
In such analysis, the paper uses the approach of Günther Teubner to studying the
“polycontexturality” of autonomous non-state regimes that legislate, adjudicate, and enforce: how
they relate to each other; to non-state regimes like universities; and to overarching state-mandated
public policy guidelines. Specifically, such an approach studies the contextual space between
such regimes as a space for the collision of discourse, language games, texturalities and projects--
both in terms of their intended outcomes and the feasible misunderstandings generated in their
unintended consequences.
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