Spotlight is published periodically by the Office of Assessment and Continuous Improvement in the College of Education to highlight promising practices in assessment and continuous improvement.
This edition of the Spotlight examines thereissues of validity, reliability, and fairness in classroom assessment, College of Education undergraduate enrollment trends through the decades, and supporting students’ sense of belonging (video essay). To be included in a future edition of the Spotlight, please contact jeremy-penn@uiowa.edu.
College of Education Mission, Vision & Values
Mission Statement
The College of Education advances education and mental health in Iowa and beyond.
Vision Statement
The best educational and mental health outcomes for all.
Values
Practice integrity. We hold ourselves to the highest standards of honesty, transparency, and ethics. We use our resources efficiently and effectively.
Affirm academic freedom. We freely seek and share knowledge. We are responsible to our disciplines, students, profession, and institution.
Foster belonging. We welcome everyone with respect, care, and dignity. We value access and opportunity for all. We encourage rigorous and respectful dialogue.
Unlock the boundless potential in each person. We build collaborative relationships, meeting people where they are. We challenge and improve systems to empower people to become their best.
Improve continuously. We pursue excellence by learning and improving everything we do.
Contributors
Prepared by Jeremy Penn.
To share a promising practice in a future edition of the Spotlight you are using in your classroom, in your program, or in your department, please contact jeremy-penn@uiowa.edu.
Classroom Assessment
Issues of Validity, Reliability, and Fairness in Classroom Assessment
I recently released a new video that summarizes the concepts of validity, reliability, and fairness in assessment in educator preparation programs. When creating the material for the video, I had to constantly remind myself that these concepts are important not only for high-stakes, large-scale assessment practices but also for assessments that happen on a day-to-day basis in our smallest classroom settings. Upon further reflection, my underlying resistance to applying concepts validity, reliability, and fairness to classroom assessment seems to be due to my training as a psychometrician and some lingering concern that it is too difficult or time consuming to use these concepts in classroom assessment. I have no idea where this belief came from – we rarely discussed classroom assessment in my psychometrics courses – as it is completely baseless as there are numerous easy ways to implement these critical concepts in classroom assessment.
Reliability. Reliability is all about consistency. Strategies for supporting consistency in classroom assessment include:
- Emphasizing clarity of assessment expectations for students and those who will be assigning grades. Some of the most effective assessments I have seen had written instructions that were longer than the final products produced by students. If students and graders do not know what to expect from an assessment, there’s no way grades can be consistent.
- Using a rubric or scoring guide that aligns graders’ assignment of grades with those clearly defined expectations.
- Carefully training and alignment across multiple graders to ensure expectations are applied in the same way.
- If only using one grader, shuffling the order in which assessments are graded (not always sorting alphabetically, for example) and looking back to earlier assigned grades to support consistency with later grading.
- Asking a colleague to provide another perspective on submissions on which there is uncertainty about what grade to provide or that fall well outside the bounds of other submissions.
- Avoiding use of confusing, unusual, or non-intuitive assessment items that may be particularly difficult for those who do not have experience with such items or who do not have English as their first language.
Validity. Validity is about having support and evidence to support the use of scores from an assessment. For most classroom assessments, the primary use of assessment is to indicate the extent to which students have achieved the course’s learning goals. Therefore, strategies to address this include:
- Ensuring assessments and the course’s learning goals are closely aligned. (If your course does not have clear learning goals, these should be developed!)
- Using a grading rubric that outlines expected levels of performance, rather than relying on arbitrary ‘percentage of points achieved.’
- Examining item and assessment difficulty and discrimination and adjusting the assessment or grades when issues arise. (Difficulty is about examining performance across tasks or items on an assessment with careful attention to those that most students get incorrect. Discrimination is about identifying tasks or items that students who performed well on the assessment got wrong and those items or tasks that students who did not perform well got correct.)
- Avoiding drawing conclusions about learning from low-stakes, low-effort assessment situations. While potentially useful for formative assessment and adjusting instruction, such low-stakes, low-effort situations do not reflect students’ best work.
- Using caution in having a large portion of a course’s final grade determined by non-learning elements (such as class attendance or participation grades), as this does not reflect learning.
- Having thoughtful, thorough policies on use of artificial intelligence to complete assessments. Assessments that are designed to assess students’ use of artificial intelligence should assess the process of using AI, not the product itself. Similarly, assessments that intend to assess students’ learning should not rely on the production of content from AI.
Fairness. Fairness is about ensuring students have the best opportunity to do their best work and is free of bias. This is an ongoing process, and instructors must always be working toward this goal. Some strategies that support fairness include:
- Using multiple assessments to ensure students have plentiful opportunities to fully demonstrate their abilities and knowledge.
- Ensuring all students have full access to all resources and materials needed to perform their best. For example, video presentations should all have access to cameras with high-quality image and sound representation.
- Avoiding assessing students when they have not had the opportunity to learn. In many degree programs, students do not take the courses in the same order; therefore, assessments should avoid requiring students to have knowledge from courses they have not yet been required to complete.
- Following principles of universal design and accessibility to proactively make all assessments and materials available and usable by all students.
Reliability, validity, and fairness are not just abstract concepts for psychometricians to discuss in graduate seminar courses! Rather, they should guide all assessments students experience, from the most extensive high-stakes assessment to a daily reading quiz on a Tuesday morning. Most importantly, there are many resources in the College of Education to support the implementation of these concepts throughout all assessment. Help will always be given to those who seek it!
College Data
College of Education
Enrollment in undergraduate programs in the College of Education in spring 2026, at 1,107, was significantly higher than undergraduate enrollment in spring 2025 (992) and was more than double the undergraduate enrollment in the College of Education in spring 2015 (505). Several people have asked if the spring 2026 undergraduate enrollment in the College of Education is the largest ever in the history of the University of Iowa. This is a deceptively difficult question to answer.
If the question is: “Is the spring 2026 undergraduate enrollment of students seeking a degree in the College of Education the largest ever,” then the answer is simple, yes, the number of students in spring 2026 enrolled in undergraduate degrees in the College of Education is the largest ever. However, this comes with the caveat that the College of Education has only been awarding its own undergraduate degrees since the 2018-2019 academic year. Prior to 2018-2019 students seeking undergraduate teacher licensure earned their degree in the College of Arts and Sciences and received their licensure recommendation – but no degree – from the College of Education.
Therefore, the answer to the question, “is the number of students pursuing teacher licensure in spring 2026 at the University of Iowa the largest ever?” is much more difficult to answer because it requires digging through historical enrollment reports that often did not specifically report the number of students enrolled in the teacher education program and that sometimes differentiated between education “interest” students (not yet fully admitted to the teacher education program and sometimes not enrolled in any other major) and sometimes did not. This further complicates the count of the number of enrolled students seeking teacher licensure because it changes how freshmen and sophomores are counted toward the total “enrolled” in teacher preparation programs.
With those challenges in mind, the University of Iowa Archive (https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/node/1546) was used to examine enrollment data from a specific year in each of the last six decades (1966, 1976, 1986, 1996, 2006, 2016) to attempt to answer this question.
Table 1.
University of Iowa Enrollment | Undergraduate Education Majors | Teacher Education Program | |
| 1966 | 17,755 | 824 | Not Reported |
| 1976 | 22,393 | 620 | 1,485 |
| 1986 | 29,504 | 839 | 1,272 |
| 1996 | 27,921 | 856 | 1,158 |
| 2006 | 29,797 | 617 | 1,152 |
| 2016 | 33,334 | 329 | 691 |
| 2026 (spring) | 31,427 | 1,107 | 902 |
1966
With 824 students, Education was described as the University of Iowa’s “most popular major.” 63% of the 17,755 students at the University of Iowa were men. The average first-semester University of Iowa GPA for undergraduate students was 2.41, a number so low that it would put many students at risk of probation using today’s standards! Cedar Rapids - Washington had the largest number of students in the freshman class with 92, Iowa City High was third with 86, while Iowa City West High School would not open until 1968. The average high school GPA of new freshmen was 2.94 (3.02 for women, 2.83 for men).
1976
By the fall of 1976, total University of Iowa Enrollment had increased 26% to 22,393 (57% men, 43% women). Business Administration was now the largest major with 726 students, dropping Education to the second most popular undergraduate major (565 women, 55 men, 620 total). The “Teacher Education Program,” which included education majors, secondary education students (pursuing majors in their discipline areas in the College of Liberal Arts), and other non-elementary licensure areas, had 1,485 students. Iowa City High School became the largest feeder school with 73 students enrolling, with Iowa City West close behind with 69 students. Average high school GPA of new students inched up to 3.17 overall (3.29 for women, 3.04 for men).
1986
In 1986 Top Gun topped the box office and the University of Iowa’s enrollment grew another 32% to 29,504 (51% men, 49% women). In the twenty years from 1966 to 1986, the University of Iowa’s total enrollment grew more than 66%! Education undergraduate majors increased to 839 (44 in Early Childhood, 645 in Elementary, 19 in Health Occupations, 67 in Science Education, and 64 in Special Education) but fell to the fourth most popular major behind Business Administration (1,652), Engineering (1,280), and Communication Studies (1,052). Graduate programs in Education remained popular with 1,077 students enrolled. Iowa City High School was tied with West Des Moines – Valley in enrolling 79 freshmen, while Iowa City West sent 62. The average high school GPA for new students remained similar at 3.19 (3.28 for women, 3.09 for men).
1996
In 1996, the greatest year to graduate high school (in this author’s humble opinion), total enrollment at the University of Iowa was 27,921, with women now comprising a slight majority of the students (52%). Education undergraduate majors remained similar to 1986, at 856 (567 in Elementary Education, 210 in Pre-Elementary Education, 30 in Education, 41 in Science Education, and 8 in Health Occupations Education), but was now the fifth most popular major, behind Engineering (1,164), Business Administration (1,075), Psychology (1,045), and English (997). Teacher Education Program enrollments were reported as 1,158 (607 Elementary Education and 551 Secondary Education). Due to a scanning error, it is not possible to determine which high schools provided the most students to the 1996 freshman class, but it appears Iowa City High School, Iowa City West High School, and West Des Moines – Valley were the top three. Average high school GPA for new students saw a large jump to 3.44 overall (3.49 for women, 3.37 for men).
2006
By 2006 the University of Iowa’s enrollment had reached 29,797 (52% women, 48% men). Enrollment in Education was reported as 617 undergraduate students, although an additional 319 students were listed as enrolled in Elementary Education Interest and 216 were listed as Secondary Education Interest in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Education was the 7th largest undergraduate program behind Business (1,647), Engineering (1,264), Psychology (1,176), Communication Studies (935), English (825), and Biology (657). Iowa City West High School had the largest number of students in the fall 2006 entering class (85), followed by West Des Moines – Valley (78), and Iowa City High School (74). The average entering high school GPA continued to rise, now 3.50 (3.56 for women, 3.43 for men), with 11% of the entering freshman class having a high school GPA of 4.0 or higher.
2016
In 2016, Adele’s world tour topped ticket sales, and the University of Iowa’s enrollment was 33,334 (52% women, 48% men). Enrollment in the College of Education was low, at 329 undergraduate students (an additional 228 elementary education interest students and 134 secondary education licensure preparation students were reported in the College of Arts and Sciences). In the fall 2016 semester, the College of Education generated only 12,561 undergraduate credit hours, nearly 50% fewer undergraduate credit hours than it generated in fall 2025. A portion of this decline in enrollment was strategic, as the College of Education prioritized growth in other areas and the University’s budget model did not directly reward enrollment. Iowa City West High School increased its lead on the number of students who enrolled at the University of Iowa to 137, with West Des Moines – Valley second with 105, and Iowa City High School third with 85. Average entering high school GPA was 3.57 (3.63 for women, 3.48 for men), with a stunning 20% of the entering freshman class having high school GPAs of 4.0 or higher.
2026
Spring 2026 enrollment at the University of Iowa was 31,427, with women an increasingly large majority at 56%. Undergraduate enrollment in the College of Education is 1,107, with 902 in the Teacher Education Program (516 Elementary Education, 90 RAPIL (non-degree), 276 Secondary / K-12 Education, and 20 MAT (graduate)), and an additional 225 in non-licensure education and mental health programs (67 Education Studies and Human Relations, 79 Counseling and Behavioral Health Services, 79 UI REACH (certificate)). Elementary Education is now the twelfth largest undergraduate major at the University of Iowa, behind Finance, Pre-Business, Psychology, Exercise Science, Business (Direct Admit), Biology, Marketing, Human Physiology, English, Nursing Interest, and Accounting. Iowa City West High School (116), Waukee Northwest High School (111), West Des Moines – Valley High School (90), and Iowa City High School (88) provided the largest number of students to the freshman class. Outside of Iowa, Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois provided the most students to the freshman class (38). The average entering high school GPA was the highest ever, at 3.86!
TL;DR
Enrollment data are complex! To answer the question about undergraduate enrollment, noting that the College did not award its own degrees before 2018-2019, it can safely be said that the College of Education has more undergraduate students enrolled in its degree programs than ever before and has the largest teacher education program enrollment in at least two decades. However, the number of students pursuing teacher education is lower in 2026 than at many points in the past, such as 1976 when the teacher education program was 64% larger. A significant component of the College of Education’s growth in undergraduate enrollment is in its non-teacher licensure programs: UI REACH (certificate program started in 2008), Education Studies and Human Relations (started in 2020), and Counseling and Behavioral Health Services (started in 2024). Whatever the future may hold for enrollment or the organization of the University of Iowa, the College of Education remains committed to unlocking students potential and advancing mental health and education in Iowa and beyond.
Promising Practice
Supporting Students’ Sense of Belonging