VALEDICTORY VIEWS.(Brief Article)(Review)

Assessment and Other Paradigms New Paradigms for College Teaching (Interaction Book Company, 1997), edited by William E. Campbell and Karl A. Smith, is a collection of essays by teachers writing about innovative, "outside the box," strategies for dealing with a range of philosophical and practical challenges faced by contemporary educators working with their contemporary students. Essay topics include strategies for planning more effectively, for creating a sense of community in the classroom, for encouraging student collaboration, for enhancing the learning environment through conflict and dialectic, for using technology productively, and for evaluating various aspects of the teaching-learning process.

Though none of the writers contributing to the collection address assessment exclusively in their essays, almost all of them seem to be aware of the centrality of the subject, in many cases basing major segments of their presentations implicitly or directly on assessment-related concepts or principles. Edward Nuhfer, in "Student Management Teams--The Heretic's Path to Teaching Success," observes, "Successful teaching is not, unfortunately, the guaranteed outcome of hard work, but rather comes from focusing our efforts on areas that will produce the needed changes and yield reasonable re- tums." He goes on to state, "We evaluate ourselves by our intentions, whereas others evaluate us by our actions." Though the main focus of Dr. Nuhfer's article is teacherstudent collaboration and not assessment per se, a basic concept underlying this part of his discussion is that evaluation is not solely a matter of the class instructor magisterially engaged in objectively quantifying students' levels of success within a traditional framework of measurement, but that the entirety of the teaching-learning process, including what the teacher does to encourage and facilitate learning, must undergo analysis, evaluation, and perhaps radical change. Working smart may. be significantly more ...