Hutchings on faculty involvement in assessment. Study builds on 'Scholarship Reconsidered'.

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OPENING DOORS TO FACULTY INVOLVEMENT IN ASSESSMENT
The assessment literature is replete with admonitions about the importance of faculty involvement, a kind of gold standard widely understood to be the key to assessment's impact "on the ground," in classrooms where teachers and students meet. Unfortunately, much of what has been done in the name of assessment has failed to engage large numbers of faculty in significant ways. Pat Hutchings, a senior associate with The Carnegie Foundation, examines the dynamics behind this reality, including the mixed origins of assessment, coming both from within and outside academe, and the more formidable obstacles that stem from the culture and organization of higher education itself. Then, she describes six ways to bring the purposes of assessment and the regular work of faculty closer together, which may make faculty involvement more likely and assessment more useful. View Hutchings’ National Institute for Learning Outcomes paper here.

PROFESSORS WHO FOCUS ON HONING THEIR TEACHING ARE A DISTINCT BREED
Professors who are heavily focused on learning how to improve their teaching stand apart as a very distinct subset of college faculties, according to a new study examining how members of the professoriate spend their time. The study, scheduled to be discussed this week at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference, was conducted by John M. Braxton, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University, and Toby J. Park, a doctoral student in higher education there. Their research follows up on influential analysis of different types of scholarly behavior that Ernest L. Boyer, president emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation, published in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Rejecting the prevailing view that the chief form of academic scholarship that mattered was "scholarship of discovery"—that is, the generation and testing of theory, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—Boyer proposed that there were other forms of scholarship that colleges should value, such as the study of effective teaching methods. This article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.