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Abstract
For well over a decade, student assessment and improving student outcomes has been a
focus of higher education and the accrediting commissions. In accordance, we have
witnessed the paradigm shift from a professor-centered “lecture paradigm” to a student-
centered “learning paradigm.” Whereby moving away from what is taught to focusing
upon what is learned. The general purposes of assessment varies from attempting to
measure how well students are learning content material to assessing teaching pedagogy
in order to improve teaching effectiveness. The evidence is showing that thinking can be
measured and that a combination of assessment approaches is most effective in
measuring student learning as well as assessing instructional effectiveness. The
pretest/posttest has been widely used across many disciplines to measure basic course
knowledge of core concepts and course objectives. While it is evident that the
pretest/posttest assessments can demonstrate evidence of course content learning and
assess instructional effectiveness, it also measures entering student preparedness for
course material. Furthermore, the instrument can be used to assess knowledge retention
from sequential course prerequisites. This paper explored content knowledge retention
across sequential courses and offers preliminary evidence that pretest/posttest data can
demonstrate content knowledge and the transferability and retention of key political
concepts and terminology. A one-year analysis of pretest/posttest data from sequential
courses is encouraging for the political science discipline in that it suggests that content
knowledge and retention of student learning can be demonstrated.
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