Building Without a Foundation: Efforts in Higher Education to Meet External Examiners Requirements in the Absence of Statewide Data

Abstract

The United States (US) has accreditation agencies that assess higher education in a manner analogous to external examiners in the United Kingdom. An example accreditor, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, requires university-level Educator Preparation Program providers (EPPs) to evaluate the degree to which (a) their graduates feel prepared to assume their professional roles as a result of their EPP training and (b) their impacts on PK-12 students’ learning. These are meaningful forms of programmatic assessment, however, governmental agencies in the United States do not uniformly collect these data. This has required many EPP providers to do so, with unintended negative consequences. The authors use this context as a case study to examine what must be done when reporting guidelines do not align with the data available. Although a single example, readers are asked to consider analogous situations within their own contexts. Presented in this chapter is the accreditation landscape, a description of the challenges listed above, common solutions, and recommendations for greater coordination among stakeholders in order to expand the systematic conferral of data in safe, ethical, and meaningful ways.

Citation

Schramm-Possinger, M., Johnson, L.E. and Costner, B.G. (2021), "Building Without a Foundation: Efforts in Higher Education to Meet External Examiners Requirements in the Absence of Statewide Data", Sengupta, E., Blessinger, P., Ssemwanga, A. and Cozza, B. (Ed.) The Role of External Examining in Higher Education: Challenges and Best Practices (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 38), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 159-172. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120210000038010