On March 1, Prof. Dan Perlman (BIOL) will begin serving as Associate Provost for the Assessment of Student Learning, according to yesterday's campuswide e-mail from Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Marty Krauss.According to Krauss' e-mail, "As Associate Provost, Prof. Perlman will be responsible for university assessment efforts by working with academic and non-academic departments on developing assessment plans and coordinating the assessment of learning goals inside and outside the classroom."

In an interview with the Justice, Krauss said that she chose Perlman for the position after she sent an e-mail to the faculty that solicited applications and received a recommendation by Prof. Sarah Lamb (ANTH), chair of a review committee for the position.

Krauss wrote in her e-mail that Perlman has been a member of the Provost's Committee for the Assessment of Student Learning since the committee's formation in 2006. Perlman said in an interview with the Justice that the committee came up with Universitywide learning goals and that it is now working with individual departments and programs to come up with their own learning goals. According to the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the organization responsible for accrediting New England universities, learning goals are "the systematic means to understand how and what students are learning and to use the evidence obtained to improve the academic program." In an e-mail to the Justice, Perlman wrote, "We are currently working with departments to help them articulate what they want their students to learn and how to instantiate those learning goals in individual courses as some departments have already started doing."

Perlman wrote that his duties as associate provost will include "chairing the assessment committee and working with departments and programs, as well as with individual professors, holding workshops, trying to highlight the role that assessment plays in the educational mission of Brandeis."

The newly created associate provost position will report directly to the provost, Krauss said. She said that Perlman "will be the key point person in the administration on these [learning assessment] issues." Krauss also said, "the issue of assessment of student learning outcomes is a very critical issue for our accrediting agencies, and we have been doing a lot of work on that. . I just thought that it would be important to see if we could get a faculty person to lead this initiative into the future."

According to a Nov. 17, 2009 Justice article, the NEASC found in a 2007 report that Brandeis "does not have a systematic, broad-based and integrated approach to assessment of student learning."

Krauss said in her interview, "the accreditation process is the backdrop, but the work that needs to be done to do a good job on that is a university-level responsibility, and so this position was in response to the university-level responsibility."

Perlman said that reevaluating the assessment process is exciting because it entails "articulating what you want your students to learn and working backward from there, thinking about how you can help them learn those things and learn them in a way that lasts long-term."

He continued, "[The process] is one that I think that many people at Brandeis have been thinking about, and I'm looking forward to working with people and helping them think about how we can effectively help our students learn.