Principles of Assessment Best Practice
More than twenty years ago, leading scholar-practitioners authored a set of Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning to provide universities and colleges a starting point for conversations about assessment as a primary tool for improving student learning. Universities and colleges across the nation and around the world continue to return to these principles as conversation-catalysts and heuristics for planning.
ACCELERATE
In 2025, the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) published an updated version of the principles comprising ten principles for assessment best practice known as ACCELERATE. The principles are excerpted below.
A: Aligned Purposefully
Ensure that assessment practices are consistently aligned with values, mission, articulated outcomes and/or objectives as applicable, as well as with relevant policies, strategic goals, and the needs of community partners in the assessment context.
C: Continuously Cultivating
Ensure that assessments continuously improve curricular and programmatic processes and policies within any given context.
C: Collaborative and Co-Creative
Intentionally collaborate and co-create with diverse partners, including learners, in all parts of the assessment endeavor.
E: Equity and Empowerment-Motivated
Seek excellence and catalyze fairness at the individual level all the way through the structural level by enabling access and opportunities for success for all and by enabling people to make changes and inform decision-making in their environments.
L: Learning-Centered
Engage in broad and deep, practice-based learning—for the assessment context and the assessment practice.
E: Energized by Expertise
Conscientiously engage in training and gaining of expertise through experience and active, focused learning to hone design, deployment, meaning-making, and dissemination literacies for the assessment endeavor to be valuable, relevant, and maybe even joyous to oneself and partners served.
R: Responsiveness-Oriented
Proactively explore and/or address systemic and emerging contextual needs of all learners, community partners, and the assessment context.
A: Action-Driven
Be obsessed and ambitious with, and foreground purposeful assessment use within, any assessment context while planning and deploying any assessment.
T: Transparent & Trustworthy
Actively build trust by maintaining a laser focus on ensuring and communicating transparency, and clearly outlining where and to whom accountability is directed at all stages of the assessment process.
E: Enduring and Evolving
Ideate strategies and strengthen practices to meaningfully serve our communities iteratively, with a focus on maturity, scalability, and sustainability.
The development of A.C.C.E.L.E.R.A.T.E. (the ten principles of assessment best practice, also known as ACCELERATE) emerged from revisiting and reviewing of the original Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning (AAHE, 1992, 1996). It began as an annual strategic initiative of the 2024-25 President of the Association for Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE), Dr. Constance Tucker. The original nine principles were reviewed by groups of assessment scholars and practitioners to discern the relevance and endurance of those principles to meet today’s evolving educational contexts while also considering whether they could support the advancement and bolstering of the field of practice of assessment as a whole. Inviting several assessment scholars, professionals, and leaders in the organization and the field, and in consultation with several authors of the original nine principles, over the course of nine months, ACCELERATE emerged and evolved into the current set of ten best practices growing out of collaborative and co-creative conversations, thinking, research, feedback, input-seeking, and idea generation across various fora and sources.