I’ve recently become more involved with assessment efforts at my university, partly out of an initial skepticism about the concept, and partly out of a realization that the implementation of assessment activities is now out of the hands of university administrators and instead increasingly required by outside accreditation agencies and state/federal government. Therefore, I wanted to understand assessment better and try to help influence it positively on our campus as much as possible.
One of the first steps in assessing students’ learning in any context is to define the outcomes [PDF]: what do we want students to learn? Then we can determine which standards to use to assess their learning. In today’s journalism programs, this process is challenging.
Certainly we want students to learn the varied skills they need to produce journalism and eventually find jobs: reporting, writing, editing, multimedia. These are professional, vocational skills, and therefore their success would be best measured by the standards for quality used by journalism professionals.
We also want students to learn to be critical and thoughtful [PDF] regarding journalism and its place in our society. That outcome is in some ways in opposition to professional ideals, which today may too often value speed and SEO over reflection and independent critique. The standards used to assess students’ development as critical thinkers about journalism, then, are rather different from the vocational standards used to measure their work. In the academic setting, these standards usually stem from the study of journalism’s role as a societal institution, but perhaps also could come from public critiques of journalism, especially for students whose programs are engaged in producing news for their local communities. I think that’s an exciting opportunity for assessing student work and helping students understand their true impact of their work.
We’re also starting to see the evolution of journalism curricula that incorporate a new range of business-oriented skills into students’ training, such as the Entrepreneurial Journalism graduate program at CUNY spearheaded by Jeff Jarvis. Students in such courses and programs learn how to brand themselves, represent their work independently, create collaborative projects, and thus develop an entrepreneurial mindset that is different from someone seeking to conform to a supervisor’s expectations. Assessing these entrepreneurial abilities and attitudes is rather more challenging. We don’t yet have clear standards for what it means to have achieved these outcomes. We can determine whether students have the factual knowledge of, say, business law that they need to be successful entrepreneurs, but assessing whether they have acquired the inventive, resilient mindset needed for success is difficult. Whose standards apply to this assessment? Not those of traditional professional journalism, and those of journalism critics don’t quite apply either.
I think one of the biggest challenges journalism educators face today in developing effective, authentic assessment activities for their departments is reconciling these myriad perspectives on what it means to be a successful journalism student today. I can think of few other disciplines in which students are pulled in so many directions.
Are you a journalism educator who has worked on these kinds of assessment issues? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
