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22 Special Topic: Assessment in University General Education Program
students to receive information on a given subject. Likewise, instructors can
record the number of questions raised by students in a recitation or discussion
section of a course, or the number of completed homework assignments to
quantify evidence at the “responding” level of the hierarchy. The majority
of affective learning outcomes that faculty seem concerned with and find
interesting, however, tend to occur at higher levels in the affective taxonomy.
Thus, they are less amenable to direct assessment, as they reflect internal
states such as attitudes, dispositions, or values. That is where a variety of
indirect assessments become crucial for the assessment of affective ILOs.
Indirect Assessment of Affective Learning Outcomes
Some affective learning outcomes (e.g., attitudes, values) simply cannot
be measured directly because they are internal states that exist only in the
minds of individual students. These types of affective outcomes tend to be
measured indirectly, as the expression of internal states, through the students’
thoughts and actions. The need to infer covert behaviors (e.g., feelings,
attitudes, dispositions) from observed actions or to use completely indirect
(non-observable) methods of assessment (e.g., self-report inventories) may be
unfamiliar to many faculty. In fact, for some faculty, particularly those trained
in the “hard sciences,” the concept of indirect measurement raises extreme
skepticism and a tendency to discount the validity of affective learning
altogether. Nevertheless, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, and
other social scientists have long established a tradition of measuring attitudes
and dispositions, which must now be shared across all of academia.
The information gathered for conducting an indirect assessment of
affective learning outcomes can come from a variety of sources, depending
on the nature of the affective ILO. These sources include the self (e.g., an