It happened over falafel.
Once a week, I work from one of my university’s distributed campuses. The primary reason that I work there is to work with the two subject librarians stationed there on a regular basis. Last week I went to lunch with one of the librarians and as usual, we talked a lot of shop. She asked me how assessment was going. I’m sure she heard more from me than she bargained. But then she asked, “What would radical assessment look like?” I think she asked it to herself as much as she asked me.
We spit-balled the first ideas that came to mind. What I landed on was this: Radical assessment removes assessment from the institutional accountability prerogative. In other words, I don’t think it’s possible as a singular form of assessment; however, I think it’s what assessment should aspire to be. Radical assessment is collecting evidence of student learning in order to improve instruction so that students are able to have a higher quality learning experience.
You might be saying to yourself, “but that is assessment.” I would argue that is what assessment is supposed to be, but not what it is in reality. Too often we assess because we’re told we must. We’re told by our accreditation agencies, our administrators, and by our assessment librarians.
Don’t get me wrong, we need to be assessing. Accountability, and whatnot. And so for me, radical assessment is designing assessments that are meaningful first, and evidence for institutional accountability second.
What does “meaningful” mean in this context? I get asked this a lot since my Library’s Student Learning Assessment Plan is based on the concept of meaningful assessment. Each librarian who teaches is asked to complete one meaningful assessment project over an academic year. Meaningful is at the interpretation of the librarian. I tell them: It should be meaningful to your instruction while applying to one of our learning outcomes (the institutional, non-radical aspect). How will it improve your instruction? How can you use it as evidence to teach more (or less)? How can it help your students learn? To me, if you start and build from there, you’re assessing radically.
I know there are plenty of different interpretations of what radical assessment looks like. One of my colleagues had some interesting thoughts. He has multiple interesting tweets, which I encourage you to read, but this one has me thinking. . .
What is radical assessment, particularly in context of information literacy, to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
You're Not Listening, Marian 
Assessment should primarily be a vehicle for pedagogical improvement. If I assess learning after my one-shots and see that students are not getting Boolean operators, I can use that information to find another way to teach it. I think it is inappropriate to compare any group of students to any other group of students and am interested in assessment only as a means of making me a better teacher.