Trust: essential to effective assessment

Regional and state evaluation mandates, and more recently the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criteria 2000, have focused attention on the need to systematically assess student learning in engineering curricula. Excellence in assessment still appears in pockets and not as the norm for most engineering programs. A primary impediment to the usefulness of methodical evaluation lies in how the culture of assessment interacts with norms of organizational trust. The methods and outlook of assessment have often been advanced without developing the requisite basis of organizational trust upon which assessment relies. The grounded approach used here to explore issues of trust in assessment allows the advancement of a four factor conceptualization of trust in assessment. These factors provide the foundation for a comparative inventory of barriers and corresponding best practices in assessment that are tied to current research findings on developing organizational trust.