Assessing Women’s Studies

The documents referenced above provide overviews of the contributions of Women’s Studies as well as its challenges, while one major project from the early 1990s offers a formal assessment of seven academic programs, complete with data collection. The project, funded by the FIPSE and directed by Caryn McTighe Musil, then Executive Director of the NWSA, consisted of a three-year study of Women’s Studies programs in a range of institutions. Working with an external advisory board, each program developed and implemented an assessment plan appropriate to its local constituents. Their data led to three publications, all edited by Musil and published by AAC in 1992: The Courage to Question: Women’s Studies and Student Learning, the Executive Summary of the Courage to Question, and Students at the Center: Feminist Assessment. All three documents remain useful and timely.

The Courage to Question is the most detailed of the three works, with a chapter by and about each of the seven programs that participated in the study; those at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Lewis and Clark College, Old Dominion University, Wellesley College, City University of New York-Hunter College, Oberlin College, and the University of Missouri-Columbia (the University of Wisconsin and Bennett College, a historically black institution, were initially involved in the grant but dropped out). Each chapter provides a brief description of the program being assessed, its goals, methodologies, and findings. A key feature of this project is that each unit decided to evaluate different aspects of its program and in different ways. For instance, Lewis and Clark decided to look for “knowledge plots” such as cultural images of sex and gender through an analysis of student papers, while Hunter College assessed learning in introductory courses from multiple perspectives. The book includes copies of assessment instruments used by the various schools, ranging from alumnae surveys to rubrics. Follow-up interviews with some of the participants in the study indicate that they have changed their assessment plans since the early nineties, largely because they found the plans developed for the grant too time-consuming and complicated.

The methodologies and instruments included in the report are important in themselves; however, the results of the project are also significant, and they form the main subject of the executive summary to the report. The executive summary is organized around key aspects of learning in Women’s Studies instead of around the experiences of the different universities involved in the study. For example, sections focus on social responsibility and diversity. The learning outcomes the executive summary sets out as essential in Women’s Studies are still important goals for the discipline and, more broadly, for liberal education in the U.S., both of which remain predominantly white, despite demographic shifts in the past few decades.

Table 1. Conclusions from Executive Summary to "The Courage to Question," ed. Musil