Under increasing pressure from the public, state legislatures and regional accrediting agencies, co lleges and universities have expanded their efforts to assess the academic achievement of their students. Earlier volumes of Lessons Learned focused heavily on national and state attempts to promote assessment and support the development of principles and technology for carrying it out.

The demand that regional accrediting agencies give more attention to the educational outcomes of the institutions with which they work has led nearly all of them to require substantial assessment activities on the campuses under their jurisdiction. A recent study by the Hudson Institute assessing assessment at a sample of higher education institutions found that 90 percent claimed some type of assessment activities on their campuses. At the same time, it found that the actual detailed attention given to academic assessment was surprisingly slight, considering all the external pressures placed on these institutions for self-evaluation. Even though assessment experts have criticized the research methodology of this study, they generally do not dispute these conclusions.

While the highly useful activities of groups like the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) or the South Carolina Higher Education Assessment Network continue undiminished, at present the responsibility for innovation is firmly fixed on individual campuses and, indeed, on individual departments.

The influence of this trend in assessment is visible in the projects described here. The Miami (OH) University project uses portfolio assessment, a popular strategy, to evaluate writing skills, while the University of Wisconsin Medical School experiments with assessment based on observation of student behavior in clinical situations.

The more broadly based, general education assessment project at the University of Connecticut was led by a former director of the AAHE Assessment Forum. It pulls together much of the accumulated understanding, both educational and technical, of the assessment movement in an effort that is second generation in its carefully formulated statement of goals, clear relationship between goals and evidence of their achievement, and multiplicity of assessment strategies.

The work of the Mathematical Association of America has more to do with assessment for placement purposes, but its success has implications for uses of technology in outcomes assessment and the possibility of developing widely accepted standards for judging outcomes.

20. University of Connecticut: Assessing General Education Outcomes--An Institution-Specific Approach

21. Miami University: Portfolio Writing Assessment in Student Placement .

22. University of Wisconsin at Madison: An Ability-Based Assessment Program at the Medical School .

23. Mathematical Association of America: Software for Computer-Generated Math Placement Tests.

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