Assessing Christian Learning: Vocation, Practices, and Investment

This paper describes a new initiative co-funded by the Kuyers Institute for Christian Teaching and Learning at Calvin University and Cardus. The initiative builds upon past Cardus work on assessing Christian school outcomes as well as the Kuyers Institute’s work on Christian pedagogical practices. The project has developed a new online assessment tool to help Christian secondary schools assess the Christian formation that they seek to offer their students and review their own educational practices. This tool, the Practicing Faith Survey, will be piloted in an initial cluster of schools in 2020. It asks students to self-report on their investment in faith-informed practices that are integral to the student role and uses their responses both to provide formative individual feedback and to offer schools aggregate data on this form of student investment. Here we will unpack some key ideas that have informed our work, focusing in turn on questions concerning faith, vocation, and practices.