Generally, our Feature Article will come from one of our colleagues in the Pacific Northwest who works in the assessment, teaching & learning arena.

However, there will be times when we highlight a piece from other resources that speaks to the issues, importance and impact of assessment.  This is one of those times.

In visiting the American Association of Higher Education's (AAHE) website, I came across an article by Linda Suskie, Director of the AAHE's Assessment Forum and Assistant to the President for Special Projects at Millersville University of Pennsylvania that outlines Seven Steps to Fair Assessment and offers suggestions for getting the word out.  As Ms. Suskie states in her article one of the things that makes assessment so fascinating is that "The answers aren't there in black and white; we have, instead, a puzzle.  We gather clues here and there, and from them try to infer an answer to one of the most important questions that educators face: What have our students truly learned?"

Published in the May 2000 AAHE Bulletin, the article "Fair Assessment Practices: Giving Students Equitable Opportunities to Demonstrate Learning" can be accessed at http://www.aahe.org/bulletin/may2.htm.

"Teachers need to know more than just their subject.  The need to know the ways it can come to be understood, the ways in can be misunderstood, what counts as understanding; they need to know how individuals experience the subject.  But they are neither required nor enabled to know these things."

Diana Luarillard, Rethinking university teaching: A framework for the effective use of educational technology. London: Routledge, 1993.