Assessment as sensemaking: Community college faculty chair perspectives

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine how faculty chairs at a large, Midwestern community college understand and engage with the assessment of student learning outcomes within academic programs. This study was informed by two conceptual paradigms of assessment: accountability and improvement. Sensemaking was used as a theoretical framework to engage faculty in a process of retrospective meaning-making. Six faculty program chairs were asked to consider the purposes and challenges of assessment within their departments and to reflect on the use of a meta-assessment rubric. The focus of this study was to understand how academic programs engage with assessment and to consider the role of reflection in the process of assessing student learning outcomes. This study found that the assessment of student learning outcomes at community colleges is best understood as a sensemaking process. Faculty chairs confirmed the benefits and limitations of the accountability and improvement paradigms as described in the research literature. Participants also acknowledged the role that reflection plays in program-level assessment and discussed opportunities and challenges of expanding the use of reflection. Instituting a process of reflective meta-assessment at the site college would help engage faculty in sensemaking and the construction of plausible narratives that would include, yet transcend, the accountability and improvement paradigms. This study contributes to the understanding of how community college faculty chairs engage with assessment, the theoretical and practical applications of sensemaking to assessment, and the role of reflective meta-assessment applied to student learning outcomes within academic programs.