Dialogue Fuels Assessment
By Peggy Maki

In the summer 2003 issue of Inquiry and Action, a series of online newsletters related to AAHE's fields of inquiry and action, Peggy Maki explains the importance of dialogue in the assessment process. The newsletter asserts that student learning is a "field of scholarly inquiry" that everyone in higher education shares. "When we talk to one another about students' learning, we wrestle with questions that are important to our institutions. We create a community that is invested in finding answers and then in asking the questions that subsequently arise from them, and so on, and so on. This ongoing dialogue fuels a cyclical examination of students' leaning and is the catalyst for meaningful assessment." (Inquiry and Action, AAHE, Summer 2003)

"Higher education thrives on dialogue. We talk. We exchange ideas, information, and points of view. We pose and answer questions. In and across our departments, programs, and administrative units we use dialogue to clarify positions or perspectives. We use dialogue as a form of pedagogy, talking faculty to student, staff to student, student to student.

We can also use dialogue to make assessment integral to teaching and learning. By talking together about student learning, a campus community can transform assessment from an externally mandated chore to an internally driven process of discovery.

From our own disciplinary research and scholarship, we know that asking good questions leads to more - and deeper - questions. The same kind of dialogue begins and sustains assessment as a process of inquiry leading to action. Consider the questions that are important to all the members of a campus community. What do we collectively want our students to know, understand and be able to do? Over the course of their studies, how will we know that they are learning what we hope they will? How do our teaching practices, programs, services and educational opportunities contribute to the leaning? Our dialogue - asking and answering these questions together - fuels a process of discovery that is intellectually robust and profoundly connected tour work as faculty, staff, administrators and students."

To read the article in its entirety, go to
http://www.aahe.org/pubs/IASummer2003.pdf