External and internal influences on institutional approaches to student assessment: Accountability or improvement?

The purpose of this study is to compare the influences of state characteris tics related to student assessment, accreditation emphasis on student asses sment, and institutional dynamics supporting student assessment on the appr oaches to student assessment that institutions have initiated. We conducted this study by examining the relevant literature, creating a national surve y instrument, surveying undergraduate institutions throughout the United St ates, and analyzing the responses of the 885 public institutions who partic ipated in our survey. Separate regressions were run for three different gro ups of institutional types on three approaches to assessment: cognitive, af fective, and post-college. Regressions for the three institutional types ex plained 21 to 27% of the Variance for cognitive assessment, 7 to 21% for af fective assessment and 6 to 19% for past-college assessment. With the excep tion of a minor influence of state characteristics for doctoral and researc h universities, institutional dynamics and accreditation region were found to be the primary influences on student assessment approaches for all insti tutional types. We found that the drive for state-level accountability has not exceeded the influence of institutional accreditation and that internal dynamics appear to be the driving force of all three approaches to student assessment.