mar09b.indd


Peter Hernon and Robert E. Dugan 

Assessment
and
evaluation


What
do
the
terms
really
mean?



In various settings, academic librarians are discussing assessment and eager to play 
a leadership role in their organizations and 
institutions. Much of what they present as 
assessment in fact appears to be evaluation. 
Complicating matters, many defi nitions of 
assessment actually incorporate the word 
evaluate. 

Assessment is a type of evaluation that 
gathers evidence perhaps from the applica­
tion of evaluation research. The purpose of 
assessment or evaluation is either account­
ability or service/program improvement. 
Both terms actually portray accountability 
and improvement differently. 

Assessment 
Stakeholders interested in higher education, 
such as national, regional, and program ac­
crediting organizations, defi ne institutional 
effectiveness as the ability of an institution 
to meet its stated mission and “to engage a 
campus community collectively in a system­
atic and continuing process to create shared 
learning goals and to enhance learning.”1 

They view such effectiveness in terms of the 
“contribution that each of the institution’s 
programs and services makes toward achiev­
ing the goals of the institution as a whole.”2 

They see institutional effectiveness as creat­
ing a culture that addresses: 

• infrastructure support (e.g., suffi cient 
human, physical, and fi nancial resources 
to support educational programs and to 
facilitate student achievement of learning 
goals); 

• output (how much is accomplished); 
• student outcomes (public account­

ability); and 

• student learning outcomes (improve­
ments of academic quality). 

Student outcomes comprise metrics that 
characterize effectiveness as a function of, 
for instance, graduation, persistence, reten­
tion, admissions yield, and employment 
rates. Student outcomes are also concerned 
with issues of affordability. Such metrics 
might be used for drawing comparisons 
(benchmarking) with peer institutions. Stu­
dent learning outcomes, which represent a 
type of impact assessment, apply to learn­
ing and are statements of what students are 
expected to know and be able to do by the 
time they graduate. 

Further, they provide a basis to view and 
to improve learning. Among the four areas 
of effectiveness, accrediting organizations 
view student learning outcomes as the most 
important. This does not mean that the other 
areas are unimportant. Other stakeholders 
might have different priorities. 

Assessment centers on learning goals put 
forth at the course, program, discipline, divi­
sion, or institutional level. In their courses, 
faculty should observe and measure as 
feasible student learning and try to enrich 
that experience.3 Accrediting organizations 
and some other stakeholders, on the other 
hand, are most interested in the program or 
institutional levels. Assessment determines 
how well programs accomplish their educa­
tional mission, demonstrate learning over the 

Peter Hernon is professor at the Simmons College 
Graduate School of Library and Information Science, e-
mail: peter.hernon@simmons.edu, and Robert E. Dugan 
is director of Sawyer Library at Suffolk University, e-mail: 
rdugan@suff olk.edu 
© 2009 Peter Hernon and Robert E. Dugan 

146C&RL News March 2009

mailto:peter.hernon@simmons.edu


duration of a program, and use the evidence 
gathered to improve teaching and learning. 
Learning is defi ned as “not only knowledge 
leading to understanding but also abilities, 
habits of mind, ways of knowing, attitudes, 
values, and other dispositions that an insti­
tution and its programs and services assert 
they develop.”4 

Those engaged in teaching students—be 
they teaching faculty or librarians—need to 
agree on learning goals for all students in a 
program, how to gather relevant evidence 
of learning, and apply that evidence to any 
part of the program in need of improvement. 
Assessment is therefore based on feedback 
that students provide that can be used to 
analyze and correct a program’s educational 
planning and execution. 

That feedback might be based on arti­
facts that enable a program to see actual 
evidence of learning (direct methods) or 
on perceptions about what students think 

they learned and about the expectations 
(indirect methods). 

The Middle States Commission on Higher 
Education, which maintains that learning can 
occur outside the classroom, encourages 
learning goals that ingrate “curricular and co­
curricular facets of the institution.”5 Where 
information literacy is a co­curricular facet, 
it requires linkage to a program’s learning 
goals. The Middle States and other accredit­
ing organizations emphasize the importance 
of integrating assessment into the institution­
al culture and developing assessment plans 
that seek to achieve learning goals. 

Evaluation 
Evaluation at the course level involves judg­
ing the extent to which students grasp course 
content. Such judgments involve the assign­
ment of grades; “grades are determined by 
students’ ability to master the content of a 
course, not by any larger assessment of what 

A few good sources 

The Middle States Commission on Higher 
Education has produced two handbooks, 
Student Learning Assessment: Options 
and Resources (2nd edition, 2007) and 
Developing Research & Communication 
Skills: Guidelines for Information Literacy 
in the Curriculum (2003). For PDF fi les,see 
www.msche.org/publications_view.asp?i 
dPublicationType=5&txtPublicationType 
=Guidelines+for+Institutional+Improve 
ment. 

Linda Suskie wrote Assessing Student 
Learning (Anker Publishing, 2004), which 
complements the first handbook. She links 
student learning assessment to the planning 
process and different methods for gather­
ing and applying evidence about student 
performance. 

The Council for the Advancement of 
Standards in Higher Education (CAS) pro­
motes standards in student affairs, student 
services, and student development pro­
grams. It offers various resources related 
to student learning assessment (www.cas. 
edu). 

Stylus Publishing has produced a number 
of works related to assessment. Examples 
include Assessing for Learning (Peggy 
Maki, 2004) as well as works on rubrics and 
e­portfolios. 

Libraries Unlimited has published our 
Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education 
(2004) and Revisiting Outcomes Assess­
ment in Higher Education (2006) as well 
as Joe Matthews’s Library Assessment in 
Higher Education (2007) and The Evalua­
tion and Measurement of Library Services 
(2007).The Government Accountability Of­
fice has a series on evaluation research and 
methodology that covers case study evalu­
ations, designing evaluations, quantitative 
data analysis, performance measurement and 
evaluation, and more (www.gao.gov/special. 
pubs/erm.html). 

Finally, Sage Publications has an excellent 
book series on “research methods, statistics, 
and evaluation” (www.sagepub.com/home. 
nav?display=catcatLevel1=&prodTypes 
=any&level1=Course1007&currTree=Courses& 
_requestid=1570471). 

March 2009  147 C&RL News 

www.sagepub.com/home
www.gao.gov/special
www.msche.org/publications_view.asp?i


has changed in the students’ understanding, 
attitudes, or perspectives.”6 In an organiza­
tional setting, evaluation provides evidence 
to distinguish between effective/effi cient 
and ineffective/inefficient programs, ser­
vices, and policies, and to address ques­
tions such as: 

• What improvements in a program, 
service, or policy might result in continu­
ous quality improvement and better ac­
countability? 

• How well does a program, service, 
or policy reach its target population and 
meet the group’s information needs and 
expectations? 

• Is the program, service, or policy be­
ing implemented in the ways envisioned? 

• Is the program, service, or policy ef­
fective and effi cient? 

Evaluation is also a political and mana­
gerial activity, which provides insights 
for making policy decisions and resource 
allocations. 

More on assessment 
Institutions often deploy a hierarchical 
framework with horizontal and vertical 
components to plan, gather, analyze, and 
report information, and to make changes 
to institutional and educational learning 
goals, as part of their effort to demonstrate 
accountability through assessment.7 When 
educators craft goals that represent the 
taxonomy of learning developed by Ben­
jamin S. Bloom,8 they “are challenged to 
consider and state explicitly what impact 
programs should have on students”9 and 
their ability to analyze, apply, comprehend, 
demonstrate, and synthesize. 

Assessment in the form of student 
learning outcomes is formative and seeks 
to improve the educational experience for 
current and future students. At the course 
level, individual faculty might use the one­
minute paper, which asks students to refl ect 
on what was covered in class that day and 
to suggest aspects that they still do not 
understand. At the start of the next class, 
those aspects are revisited. Assessment at 

the course level, therefore, is formative and 
evaluation is summative. 

When viewed at the program level, 
all of those engaged in formal classroom 
teaching might agree on a scoring rubric 
that divides a learning outcome into cat­
egories that vary along a continuum for the 
purpose of improving feedback on student 
performance and identify areas for student 
improvement. That continuum presents 
levels of achievement in some detail, and a 
rubric might be used across programs and 
perhaps for an entire discipline. 

Finally at the institutional level, evidence 
is gathered from a sample of students to 
reflect the student body in general and to 
demonstrate whether there is a progression 
in student learning. 

Conclusion 
Understanding the language differentiating 
assessment and evaluation is necessary to 
ensure appropriate planning, measure­
ment, and analysis as well as the prepara­
tion of a meaningful self­study report for 
the accreditation organization. Advancing 
student learning is a core purpose of 
higher education, and assessment examines 
educational quality in terms of how well 
institutions achieve their declared mission 
relative to student learning. Everyone in­
volved directly in teaching students has a 
stake in shaping program and institutional 
plans on assessment. 

As institutional researchers and fac­
ulty evaluate different methodologies for 
gathering evidence and consider research 
designs involving the use of sampling (e.g., 
probability and nonprobability), experi­
mental designs, and inferential statistics, 
librarians should join them in making sure 
the library is an integral, educational part­
ner. To do so, they need to understand and 
be able to conduct evaluation research as 
an inquiry process. 

Complicating matters, schools of library 
and information science often do not re­
quire courses on research and evaluation, 
let alone assessment, as part of the core 

148C&RL News March 2009



curriculum. Students might encounter 
coverage of evaluation, and perhaps even 
assessment, in an elective course. 

Professional associations and libraries 
themselves often do not offer workshops 
on research as a process of formal inquiry 
or evaluation as applied to assessment. To 
us, this is a failure of the profession—one 
that can and should be rectifi ed through 
joint efforts. 

Notes 
1. Student Learning Assessment: Options 

and Resources, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: 
Middle States Commission on Higher Edu­
cation, 2007), 5. 

2. Ibid., 75. 
3. Measure is not necessarily the same 

as countable. 
4. Peggy L. Maki, Assessing for Learning 

(Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2004), 3. 
5. Student Learning Assessment, 6. 
6. Richard P. Keeling, Andrew F. Wall, 

Ric Underhile, and Gwendolyn J. Dungy, 

Assessment Reconsidered: Institutional Ef­
fectiveness for Student Success. Published 
by International Center for Student Success 
and Institutional Accountability (distributed 
by the National Association of Student Per­
sonnel Administrators, 2008), 9. 

7. For a depiction of this complex 
framework see Robert E. Dugan and Peter 
Hernon, “Institutional Mission­centered 
Student Learning,” in Revisiting Outcomes 
Assessment in Higher Education, edited 
by Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and 
Candy Schwartz (Westport, CT: Libraries 
Unlimited, 2006), 6. 

8. Benjamin S. Bloom, Taxonomy of 
Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The 
Cognitive Domain (New York: David McK­
ay Co., 1956; Lorin W. Anderson and David 
R. Krathwohl, A Taxonomy for Learning, 
and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Tax­
onomy of Educational Goals (New York: 
Longman, 2001). 

9. Keeling et al., Assessment Reconsid­
ered, 25. 

March 2009  149 C&RL News 

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