The collective result of years of dialogue and the Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship research group (APPS), Imagining America’s white paper, “Democratically Engaged Assessment: Reimagining the Purposes and Practices of Assessment in Community Engagement.” (DEA), puts forward recommendations for how to transform assessment in higher education.
Instead of the familiar, top-down approaches, DEA re-envisions assessment as an empowering and liberating process, writing:
“What motivates APPS to explore, develop, and refine DEA is our desire to bridge this gap between assessment as it is too often experienced — a managerial imposition, an expert-driven process, a perfunctory afterthought — and assessment as what we think it can and should be: a transformative process that involves all stakeholders in values-engaged exploration of the processes, relationships, and results of their collaborative work to reshape and renew public life.”
Access their full report and case studies.