Abstract
Promoting Integrated and Transformative Assessment by Catherine M. Wehlburg addresses the role of assessment in higher education, discussing it as a complex process with the ultimate purpose of serving student learning. Writing as a university-based executive director of an office for assessment and quality enhancement, Wehlburg provides the reader with a wide-ranging overview of assessment including historical roots, general guidelines for and issues in implementation, such as garnering faculty support and understanding institutional dynamics, and appreciating the implications of assessment as an established reality in today’s higher education environment.
Wehlburg uses the term “transformative” to convey meaningful change in an everyday sense without specific reference to theories in the field of transformative education, though there are connections. She defines transformative assessment as a “process that will inform decision making that is appropriate meaningful, sustainable, flexible and ongoing and will use data for improvement with the potential for substantive change” (p. 13). From a quality improvement perspective, individual, group, and institutional change, or transformation, results from self-examination and reflection associated with assessment activities expected to continuously improve teaching and learning. Thus, her use of the term transformative conveys the goal of substantive engagement and change, but also implies that not all assessment initiatives achieve it.
In addition to substantive change, Wehlburg’s analytic approach to assessment as a process incorporates the concept of mind-set, and conceptually her use is consistent with Mezirow's (1991) writing. However, her focus is more on how a lack of consideration of worker mind-sets may lead to misunderstanding and misapplication of assessment. These problems in assessment implementation, including binary thinking, can undermine assessment activities at the faculty, department, and institutional levels, and these types of issues serve as the backdrop for her explanation of assessment principles. Her review provides readers with insight into workplace contexts where required, or expected, transformation may fail due in part to a lack of awareness, in this case, of faculty and administrator preexisting beliefs and mind-sets.
The content is primarily informed by Wehlburg’s experience and the literature cited is largely limited to the rationale for assessment and early implementation frameworks. However, she does go beyond a simple instrumental view of learning of assessment practice. Drawing on her experience, she calls for appreciating system issues such as differences in the functional areas of academic and student affairs and managing the external pressures associated with accreditation and accountability. This contextualized analysis suggests that in organizations, mind-sets may be informed by roles and responsibilities and external pressures affecting workers’ experiences. Understanding these types of mind-sets may be central when workers are expected to learn and adopt new practices like assessment. From this viewpoint, workers may hold situated and informed mind-sets as well as uncritically assimilated perspectives, which have been the primary focus in transformative learning theory (Cranton & Taylor, 2012; Meizrow, 1991).
Wehlburg advocates for an assessment and implementation approach that avoids top-down implementation, allocates appropriate time to the work, and facilitates faculty ownership of assessment consistent with their ownership of curriculum. From a transformative education theoretical framework, these guidelines can be seen as conditions or actions that may foster openness to learning, or learning to learn. Wehlburg best illustrates guidelines that foster transformative assessment in Chapter 7 on institutional implementation and Chapter 8 on embedding assessment activities across the institution where she provides in-depth guidance for those who may be leading an assessment initiative. Other chapters provide little depth for anyone who might want more of a how-to guide for assessment. Instead, Wehlburg provides more of a strategic overview providing long lists or principles with few detailed illustrations.
Transformative assessment as presented by Wehlburg is an adaptive learning challenge (Heifetz, 1994 in Watkins, Marsick, & Faller, 2012) and her organizational focus provides some insight into how to frame work-based learning (Merriam, Cafferella, & Baumgartner, 2007). However, the transformative education theory alignments are implicit rather than explicit. Therefore, the book might best serve someone without much higher education experience who is called upon to lead a campus-wide assessment initiative or new faculty members who need to appreciate their role in assessment and its advancement of the university mission. These readers will find a set of general principles and guidelines, which may help them appreciate contextual parameters affecting the implementation of assessment.
The contribution to the field of transformative education is related to insights that can be gained from Wehlburg’s attention to organizational roles and dynamics that may influence mind-sets and perspective shifts central to workplace adaptive learning and substantive change in practices. The author’s review of assessment as a process illustrates dynamic interactions between worker and organization. Consistent with Watkins, Marsick, and Faller (2012), Wehlburg’s overview of transformative assessment demonstrates that organizational learning for substantive change in workplace practices is tied to both individual worker and system transformations.