Assessment and Continuous Quality Improvement: a North American Case Study

SUMMARY

A study visit to three institutions of higher education in America is the setting for a case study of a five stage assessment model at one of the institutions visited, James Madison University, in Virginia.

Cultural and pedagogical comparisons always have the potential to offer new perspectives on our own ways of working. The model of assessment described and analysed in this paper raises and addresses some familiar questions about the purposes of assessment, alongside issues of validity and reliability in the academic arena and beyond it. James Madison University has a single office of student assessment which is responsible for applying, monitoring and improving student assessment across the whole institution, both to academic programmes and to student support services; this seems to be almost as unusual in the USA as it would be in Britain. How this model came to be established and the benefits and drawbacks for teaching staff and students will be described and analysed.

The opportunity to observe universities within a foreign and barely understood socio‐political environment leads to some considerations of new ways of working with institutional and national political power relations. As a result of these considerations, and thanks in part to reflections at an international workshop at Alverno College, Milwaukee, the writers identify some approaches to effecting and managing change in an educational institution, particularly those concerned with staff and personnel development.