The Role of Students in Women’s Studies Assessment and Evaluation

Faculty and administrators in Women’s Studies have a major opportunity to take leadership in assessment by involving students further in this important activity. Currently, students in all disciplines participate in assessment and program reviews through course evaluations, surveys, and focus groups. In Women’s Studies, student representatives also frequently serve on certain committees. At Northern Illinois University, for example, the Women’s Studies Executive Committee contains three student members, and undergraduate, a graduate student, and a teaching assistant. The curriculum committee also relies on student representatives.

More can and should be done in this area, because among the skills necessary for success in the twenty-first century is the ability to evaluate not only information but also workplace processes and structures; employees’ achievements; income and expenditures; and the alignment of mission to goals. Indeed, according to the AAC&U report Liberal Education Outcomes, “evaluation is the highest level of the cognitive domain, [and] students themselves should be challenged to learn assessment techniques in which they assess work in exactly the same ways used by experts” (8). The involvement of students in assessment is entirely congruent with the student-centered mission of Women’s Studies, as well as with the interdiscipline’s emphasis on analytical thinking; as the AAC&U report notes, “a ‘culture of assessment’ would not only use... feedback to assess and improve student learning, but would also teach students the critical skills and discipline-specific vocabulary needed to become proficient self-evaluators, a capacity vital for achieving at high levels” (8).

Among recommended best practices in Women’s Studies, then, is the development of strategies that deliberately involve students in multiple stages of assessment or program review. Assessment should become another tool for learning and another skill to be learned, rather than an extraneous burden. As Meacham suggests above, students may be drafted to help design course evaluation forms. The Women’s Studies program at Hope College has pioneered a way to make assessment reports vehicles for conveying student voices. On other campuses, portfolios engage students in self-reflection on their progress toward meeting goals for learning in particular courses. Christopher Bell at Towson State College incorporates positive and negative comments from past course evaluations into his syllabi for current courses, offering visible proof that the instructor cares about students’ opinions and that assessment results go directly into improving classes.

At the University of Minnesota in Morris, Women’s Studies majors are required to enroll in a one-credit course, Assessment of Student Learning in Women’s Studies. The course is taken after students have completed most of the major, and, according to the program’s website, it involves completion of a portfolio as well as “a paper reviewing the UMM women’s studies program” and “participation in a panel discussion” about the strengths and weaknesses of the program. Elsewhere, the course is described as the primary mode of assessment in the department. The papers students write evaluating the program are shared with faculty and used to improve the unit.

Student observer programs at a number of institutions, such as Carleton College and Brigham Young University, offer a model that might be extended to and by Women’s Studies programs. In these projects, selected students train to observe classes taught by professors other than their own. They may then be invited to assist in numerous ways: they may observe a class once or multiple times; they may interview students about a course when the instructor is not present; they may videotape and comment on classes; or they may participate in other kinds of formative evaluation.

The program is entirely optional and confidential. Faculty members are not required to include information about their participation in the program in their formal evaluations unless they choose. In some universities, student consultants receive credit; in others, they are paid in the same way that peer tutors are remunerated. Students who participate sharpen their listening and observation skills, learn how to give constructive criticism, and have multiple opportunities to write reports. At Brigham Young, approximately 300 instructors participated in the program over six years.

It is difficult to maintain confidentiality within a small Women’s Studies program where students may know and take classes from every instructor. Consequently, student consultant programs tend to be college or university-wide. However, such programs could be adapted for use in large Women’s Studies departments, or Women’s Studies students could be trained with a particular emphasis on gender and then make themselves available to faculty across campus.

In “Student Collaboration in Faculty Development: Connecting Directly to the Learning Revolution,” Milton Cox and D. Lynn Sorenson describe the student consultant system as well as other ways in which students might be involved in improving teaching and learning, including seminars in which students and faculty share their views of what matters in a classroom. Women’s Studies faculty and program administrators are encouraged to consider these strategies and to create their own ways of making student involvement in assessment a key feature of their units. The history of student collaboration with faculty in Women’s Studies programs makes them ideal sites for developing new best practices which may then be adapted by other disciplines. Involving students in assessment in a deliberate, systematic, and knowledgeable way has another benefit as well: it will result in more useful and consistent information from students to their peers than the rants and skewed data found in unofficial college guides or websites such as www.RateMyProfessors.com.