Accountability, Assessment, and the Scholarship of “Best Practice”

Abstract

Accountability systems, in various and evolving designs, have struggled to spur increases in the quality, efficiency, and productivity of higher education institutions. The effort to identify “what works” and disseminate higher education “best practices” to improve institutional effectiveness is ongoing under numerous accountability, assessment, and research initiatives. To characterize what we know and what we need to know from a “scholarship of best practices,” this paper analyzes the methods and goals of contemporary academic and institutional research investigating the effectiveness of collegiate educational practices. To address our concern that the search for “best practices” in its current form will be ineffectual, we propose the creation of evidence-based inquiry councils (EBICs) as a central feature of a comprehensive accountability system designed to integrate knowledge of institutional contexts, educational processes, and learning outcomes for the purpose of increasing the educational effectiveness of colleges and universities.