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If you’ve spent much time in the eastern or midwestern United States, you’ve probably encountered the mass emergence of periodical cicadas. Every 13 to 17 years (depending on the brood), billions of these insects emerge from the soil at once and “serenade” us with loud and incessant buzzing that can last for weeks. Then, as suddenly as they appear, they disappear again, leaving little trace until the next cycle.
On many campuses, assessment is experienced in much the same way. For long stretches, it remains largely invisible, only to reemerge during reporting seasons or accreditation cycles with a sense of urgency, obligation, and dread. It is endured, managed, and survived: rarely embraced as an ongoing part of institutional life.
The Culture of Compliance
One reason many of us experience assessment in this way is because we are operating in what Stanley Ikenberry and George Kuh (2015) called the “culture of compliance.” Assessment in higher education originated from a desire to study how well learning was occurring in students. However, as Ikenberry and Kuh note, the 1980s saw an increase in external pressure to demonstrate value and ensure quality services were being offered.
Consequently, many institutions began practicing assessment with the end goal of compliance rather than learning. Over time, the focus shifted toward meeting the requirements of accreditors and government agencies, often without much thought on how assessment can benefit faculty, staff, and students. Ikenberry and Kuh summarize the situation well: “As a result [of the culture of compliance], the purposes and processes of assessment—collecting and reporting data to external audiences—continue to take primacy over the institution’s consequential use of the results of outcomes assessment” (2015, p. 6).
This external pressure is not going away anytime soon, especially for higher education institutions that receive Title IV federal funding (think FAFSA, Federal Work-Study, Pell Grants, etc.). Institutions must be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor to receive these funds, and all major U.S. institutional accreditors currently require institutions to engage in systematic assessment of student learning and institutional effectiveness, including the effectiveness of student support and student development functions (see Appendix). For most of us, this is not a hypothetical concern: we work at institutions that rely heavily on tuition revenue to keep the doors open, and our students require financial aid to pay the tuition on which we depend. As a result, assessment is not something institutions can simply wait out or ignore until the next cycle passes. To put it bluntly, if an institution wishes to remain accredited (and remain eligible to receive federal financial aid), assessment is nonnegotiable.
Understanding Our Motivation (Or Lack Thereof)
Assessment need not be only a “necessary evil”. When done well, it can lead to meaningful, ongoing improvement in the services we offer our students, ensuring we provide the best possible level of engagement and support. However, it is difficult to practice assessment well when the thought of it is more shaped by dread than by motivation.
Situated Expectancy-Value Theory (SEVT) helps us understand how to increase our motivation to practice assessment well, explaining why individuals choose to engage in and persist with certain tasks based on their expectancy of success, perceived value, and cost. Put simply, SEVT posits that motivation is strongest when individuals (1) believe they can succeed, (2) see value in the task, and (3) perceive costs as manageable (Eccles & Wigfield, 2020).
When assessment is viewed as a compliance-driven, externally imposed requirement, it is experienced as having little value, a low expectation for success, due in part to its infrequency and “foreignness” to our regular responsibilities, and an inconvenient cost that competes with what we perceive as our “real work.” From a SEVT perspective, this combination of low expectancy, low value, and high cost all but guarantees minimal engagement and effort in assessment. care
SEVT also helps explain why simply encouraging us to “care more about assessment” is unlikely to succeed. Unless assessment practices are designed in ways that increase expectancy for success, make value visible, and reduce perceived costs, assessment will continue to surface episodically (much like cicadas) rather than becoming an ongoing part of institutional life.
Reflecting on the following two questions can help us discern whether our assessment practices are rooted primarily in a culture of compliance or oriented toward improving our service to students:
“Who are we assessing for?”
“What is the role of students in the assessment process?”
Who Are We Assessing For?
A helpful place to begin is by asking who the primary “end users” of assessment results are intended to be. Are assessment reports designed primarily to demonstrate compliance with accreditation standards, or are they created for faculty and staff to better understand their work, make decisions, and improve the services they provide to students?
When assessment is conducted primarily for external audiences, its relevance to daily practice is often unclear. Results are collected, summarized, and archived largely to satisfy reporting requirements, with limited expectation that they will meaningfully inform local decision-making. Unsurprisingly, such practices reinforce low expectations for meaningful success and low perceived value, while reinforcing the perceived cost of assessment as “one more thing” added to our plates amid all our other responsibilities.
By contrast, when assessment is intentionally oriented toward internal users, its motivational profile changes. Assessment results designed for employees within the organization to understand what has occurred, why it occurred, and how practice might be improved are more likely to be experienced as valuable and worth the effort required to produce them. When practitioners can reasonably expect that assessment results will inform real decisions and contribute to improved student experiences, expectancy for success increases. If results help tell the story of the work being done, highlighting both strengths and areas for growth, the perceived value of assessment rises. Finally, once assessment is integrated into ongoing practice rather than reserved for reporting seasons, its perceived cost becomes more manageable; rather than being “one more thing,” it can begin to be experienced as a regular part of our ongoing work.
What Role Do Students Play in the Assessment Process?
This second question concerns the role students occupy within the assessment process. Are students positioned primarily as sources of data (respondents to surveys, subjects of metrics, or entries in a dashboard) or are they understood as stakeholders whose experiences and perspectives help shape how services are evaluated and improved?
In compliance-oriented assessment cultures, students are often present only indirectly. Their behaviors, outcomes, or satisfaction ratings are collected, aggregated, and interpreted by others, with limited opportunity for students to understand how their input is used or to see its connection to changes in practice. When assessment functions this way, students become objects of measurement rather than participants in a shared improvement effort. This is especially dangerous for those of us who have fewer face-to-face interactions with our students because of the nature of our roles; we are at greater risk of dehumanizing them and reducing them to numbers.
When assessment is oriented toward improvement, however, the role of students necessarily shifts. Students’ experiences are not only measured but also interpreted as accounts of how well we are accomplishing our mission. Assessment results are more likely to be discussed in relation to concrete student experiences, and in some cases, shared back with students to demonstrate how their input has informed change. In these contexts, assessment becomes less about extracting information and more about listening and collaborating with our students to better understand and advance the mission to which we are called.
From Cicadas to Ongoing Practice
Ultimately, the goal is not to eliminate assessment cycles, but to ensure they do not arrive like cicadas: loud, disruptive, and fleeting. When assessment is embedded in practice, oriented toward improvement, and attentive to student experience, it moves from something we survive to something that quietly and consistently helps us better serve the students entrusted to our care.
References
- Eccles, J. S., & Wigfield, A. (2020). From expectancy–value theory to situated expectancy–value theory: A developmental, social cognitive, and sociocultural perspective on motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, 101859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101859.
- Ikenberry, S. O., & Kuh, G. D. (2015). From compliance to ownership: Why and how colleges and universities assess student learning. In G. D. Kuh, S. O. Ikenberry, N. A. Jankowski, T. R. Cain, P. T. Ewell, P. Hutchings, & J. Kinzie (Eds.), Using evidence of student learning to improve higher education (pp. 1–23). Jossey-Bass.
Appendix: National Accreditors and Their Standards for Accreditation
- Higher Learning Commission. (2025). Criteria for accreditation.
https://www.hlcommission.org/accreditation/policies/criteria/ - Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (2023). Standards for accreditation and requirements of affiliation (14th ed.).https://www.msche.org/standards/
- New England Commission of Higher Education. (2021). Standards for accreditation.
https://www.neche.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Standards-for-Accreditation-2021.pdf - Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. (2020). Standards for accreditation.
https://nwccu.org/standards/ - Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. (2024). Principles of accreditation: Foundations for quality enhancement. https://sacscoc.org/app/uploads/2024/01/2024PrinciplesOfAccreditation.pdf
WASC Senior College and University Commission. (2023). 2023 handbook of accreditation: Standards of accreditation. https://www.wscuc.org/handbook2023/#standards-of-accreditation
