Contributing authors: Kris Acheson-Clair

Tasks: Point to foundational publications; Recommend an approach or strategy

Keywords: values assessment, program evaluation, systematic measurement, transformative learning, BEVI 

Positionality Statement: I write as a scholar-practitioner whose career has moved back and forth between designing values-based educational experiences and studying their outcomes. Within the fields of international education and leadership development, I have spent years wrestling with the gap between what educators hope their programs produce and what they can actually demonstrate. This post emerges from that tension — and from a conviction that taking values seriously means being willing to ask hard questions about evidence.

Values-Based Education occupies a strange position in contemporary educational practice. On one hand, its goals are arguably the most important an educational institution can pursue: the cultivation of ethical agency, of care for others, of the capacity to navigate difference and complexity with wisdom and integrity. On the other hand, these goals are among the hardest to assess, and among the least often assessed rigorously. Programs designed to develop values are regularly launched, funded, celebrated — and evaluated, if at all, through satisfaction surveys and anecdotal success stories.

This post argues for a different standard. If values matter (and the GAVE community clearly believes they do) then understanding whether and how educational programs actually develop them matters too. That understanding requires systematic measurement with valid instruments. The case for doing so is not primarily about accountability to external funders, though that matters. It is about integrity: the integrity of taking our goals seriously enough to ask whether we are meeting them, for all learners, across diverse contexts.

This post asks questions key to GAVE’s mission: Why do so many VbE programs go unmeasured, and why should that change? Two sections address each of these questions in turn.

The gap between the ambition of VbE programs and the evidence base supporting them is not an accident. Several converging forces push against systematic assessment, and understanding them is a prerequisite for changing the norm.

The assumption of effectiveness

Perhaps the most pervasive barrier is the belief, often implicit and usually well-intentioned, that a well-designed program will produce the outcomes it aims for. Educators who have invested deeply in a program’s design, who have witnessed moving moments in a workshop or classroom, and who hold genuine commitments to the values they are trying to cultivate often experience formal evaluation as beside the point. The program works; they have seen it work. What would be learned from measuring it?

What would be learned, in fact, is a great deal. The subjective experience of educators witnessing transformation is real evidence. But it is not systematic evidence. It cannot tell us whether transformation occurred for learners who were less visible or less verbally expressive. It cannot tell us whether outcomes persisted past the end of the program. It cannot tell us whether the same program produces the same effects in different institutional or cultural contexts. And it cannot tell us whether outcomes were equitably distributed across learners with different backgrounds and identities, a question that systematic quantitative research has shown to be far from guaranteed (Pang & Acheson, 2025; Wandschneider et al., 2015).

The belief that values can’t be measured

A second, related assumption is methodological: that values are too personal, too complex, or too context-dependent to be captured by formal measurement instruments. This concern deserves to be taken seriously. Values are not knowledge or skills, which can be demonstrated directly. They are affective, relational, largely non-conscious, and bound up with identity and formative experience in ways that simple survey responses cannot easily access.

But “difficult to measure” is not the same as “impossible to measure.” The past several decades have produced a suite of psychometrically validated instruments specifically designed to assess the deep structure of beliefs, values, and self-formation processes — instruments that probe far below the level of stated preferences or satisfaction ratings. The Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI), for example, has been administered to hundreds of thousands of participants across more than 100 countries, with validated scales assessing 17 dimensions of belief and value structure including worldview, sociocultural openness, emotional attunement, and meaning-seeking (Shealy, 2016; Wandschneider et al., 2015). The question is not whether values can be measured but whether educators and institutions are willing to invest in the instruments that do so rigorously.

Practical and structural barriers

Even educators who are persuaded that measurement matters face real practical obstacles (Luu et al., 2017). Administering validated instruments requires time: time in the curriculum for pre- and post-testing, and time outside it for data management and analysis. It requires expertise that is not evenly distributed across practitioner communities: expertise in psychometrics, in statistical analysis, and in interpreting results in ways that are actionable for program design. It often requires resources: licensing fees, access to analysis platforms, and personnel capable of carrying the work forward.

These barriers are real, and acknowledging them is part of making the case for assessment. Educator burn-out and the time-poor environment in which they operate are, in particular, a significant obstacle to the hard work of assessment. The argument is not that every VbE practitioner must become a quantitative researcher overnight. It is that the field as a whole needs to build the infrastructure, including collaborative research networks, shared instruments, accessible training in assessment literacy, that makes rigorous outcome evaluation feasible across diverse institutional contexts. GAVE itself is well-positioned to support that infrastructure-building work.

Fear of finding out

A less often acknowledged barrier is the discomfort that rigorous assessment can produce. What if the data showed that a beloved program produced no measurable values change? Or, more troublingly perhaps, what if it produced different outcomes for learners from different backgrounds? What if the evidence revealed that a program works well for the majority while leaving marginalized learners unaffected or even negatively impacted?

These are uncomfortable possibilities. But the alternative — not knowing — is not a neutral position. It means continuing to allocate resources, curricular time, and institutional prestige to programs whose effects on all learners remain unexamined. The discomfort of discovering a gap between intention and outcome is the beginning of genuine program improvement, not its enemy. Educators can’t fix issues they don’t know exist.

The case for systematic assessment rests on multiple interlocking rationales. It is simultaneously formative and summative, simultaneously serving the learners currently in our programs and the broader communities of practice and policy that shape whether values-based education flourishes or fades.

For current learners: Assessment as a formative tool

The most immediate argument for systematic measurement is that the right instruments do not merely measure values development; they can actively support it. Pre-assessment data offer educators a window into who their learners are before an intervention begins: what beliefs and values they bring, what experiences have shaped them, where their growing edges are most likely to lie. That knowledge is the foundation of responsive, individualized pedagogy.

Post-assessment data close the loop by giving learners themselves a language for the changes they have undergone. This matters because one of the persistent challenges of values-based learning is that transformation is often felt before it is understood. Learners experience disorientation, new perspectives, or unfamiliar emotional responses without having frameworks for naming what is happening. Research using the BEVI has found that giving learners access to their own assessment results, in facilitated reflection contexts, can itself become a catalyst for deeper processing of transformative experience — making assessment not a burden added on top of the learning experience but part of the experience itself (Wiley et al., 2021).

Pre-assessment data also reveal something that educators often underestimate: that who learners are when they arrive is not a constant. Global events, cultural shifts, and shared social experiences can reshape the values and worldviews of entire cohorts of learners in ways that have direct implications for program design. Large-scale longitudinal data collected across multiple cohorts using consistent instruments can detect those generational shifts and alert educators when the learner population they are designing for has changed.

Research Spotlight: Are you designing your VbE program for the learners you had five years ago — or the ones in your classroom today? Jaiswal, Smith, Diatta-Holgate, Morris, and Acheson (2024) tracked BEVI pre-test scores across multiple cohorts of undergraduate students before, during, and after COVID-19. Statistically significant and educationally meaningful shifts of 5–10 points emerged on every single relevant BEVI scale during the pandemic period, and those shifts have held into the post-COVID years rather than reverting to pre-pandemic baselines. Students are now entering values-related courses with substantially different worldviews than previous cohorts — closer to intended learning outcomes on many scales, yet requiring different pedagogical approaches as a result. Only systematic, longitudinal measurement made this finding visible.

For educators: Understanding differential impact

Aggregate outcome data tell us whether a program produced measurable change on average. But averages can conceal as much as they reveal. One of the most important contributions systematic measurement makes to educators is the identification of differential impact: the finding, repeated across multiple studies, that the same program can produce meaningfully different outcomes for learners from different backgrounds.

The Forum BEVI Project provided a striking illustration of this phenomenon in the context of international education. When outcome data were disaggregated by learners’ baseline BEVI Full Scale scores, reflecting the underlying structure of their beliefs and identity, researchers found that the same international learning experience produced opposite effects in different subgroups on the Identity Diffusion scale. Learners with lower baseline scores showed sharp decreases in identity confusion after the program; learners with higher baseline scores showed equally sharp increases. Averaged across the whole cohort, these opposing patterns cancelled each other out, creating the misleading appearance of no change (Wandschneider et al., 2015). Without disaggregated data, this pattern would have remained invisible.

What do these patterns actually mean? The Identity Diffusion scale on the BEVI reflects the degree to which a person experiences confusion, uncertainty, or instability in their sense of self. For learners who entered the program with relatively stable identity foundations, the international learning experience appeared to do what Transformative Learning theory predicts it should: the disorienting dilemmas, the immersion in unfamiliar contexts, and the challenge to taken-for-granted assumptions productively unsettled a previously comfortable sense of self, producing a measurable increase in identity confusion that may signal the beginning of genuine transformation. For learners who entered already experiencing significant identity uncertainty, by contrast, the same program appeared to offer something different and equally valuable: the structured encounter with difference, supported by intentional reflection, may have provided a framework through which to begin making sense of an already-uncertain identity, producing a measurable decrease in identity confusion, a kind of settling into self.

If we took the group mean change at face value (that is, no apparent shift overall) we might assume the program was not having much impact. However, the disaggregated data tell a very different story: the same program appears to be doing genuinely beneficial, but different, work across the population. Programs that assess learners’ identity baseline at entry are better positioned to anticipate these divergent trajectories, offer differentiated support, and interpret outcomes accurately. What looks like no effect when averaged together may, on closer inspection, represent two distinct forms of growth.

More recent work has found similar patterns by race. Pang and Acheson (2025) found statistically significant differences between Black and White students across all four dimensions of transformative learning outcomes (worldview, epistemic capacity, self, and ontology) and between Asian and White students on worldview and epistemic capacity. These findings do not tell us why those differences emerged; that is a question for further investigation. But they tell us that educators who treat their cohorts as homogeneous, and who evaluate programs only on aggregate outcomes, risk designing and sustaining programs that serve some learners well while leaving others behind.

Research Spotlight: Wondering whether your values-based course is reaching all your learners equally? Iseminger, Acheson-Clair, Kelly, and Morris (2020) demonstrated that students’ social identities significantly shaped their attainment of values-related learning outcomes — and that aggregate course-level data hid these differential patterns entirely. The article offers a compelling case for why sub-group analysis is not a research luxury but a practical necessity for educators committed to equitable outcomes.

For future learners: Building an evidence base for the field

The argument for systematic measurement is not only about the learners currently enrolled in a program. It is also about the learners who will come after them, and about whether the institutions and educators who serve those learners will have access to an evidence base rigorous enough to inform their work.

VbE as a field has accumulated substantial knowledge about what values-based learning looks and feels like from the inside, through decades of qualitative inquiry. What it has accumulated far less of is replicable, generalizable evidence about what works, for whom, under what conditions, and why. Building that evidence base requires outcome studies that use shared theoretical frameworks and validated instruments across multiple sites and contexts — studies that can speak to one another, accumulate, and eventually support the kind of confident claims about effective practice that characterize mature fields.

Hoggan’s (2016) typology of transformative learning outcome dimensions (including worldview, epistemic capacity, self, and ontology) offers one such shared theoretical framework. Research aligning that typology with the BEVI’s scales has demonstrated both its empirical tractability and its capacity to generate findings that are specific enough to be actionable and general enough to travel across educational settings (Acheson et al., 2022; Wiley et al., 2021; Pang & Acheson, 2025). 

Consider what transformation often looks like in practice: a learner who returns from a semester abroad not only seeing the world differently, but also questioning assumptions they previously took for granted, feeling less certain about who they are, and engaging with others in new ways. These are not four separate changes; they are facets of a single shift moving through the whole person simultaneously. The cumulative picture that emerges from this body of research confirms that pattern empirically. Transformative learning operates as a genuinely interconnected network of changes, with shifts in worldview, epistemic capacity, sense of self, and ways of being reliably predicting one another. Instruments that capture only one of these dimensions, for example a pre-post survey of intercultural attitudes or a reflection on identity, necessarily underestimate the full scope of what has changed. 

For institutions and policymakers: The language of evidence

Beyond the practitioner community, systematic measurement serves a crucial function in the broader institutional and policy environments within which VbE programs operate. Educational institutions make resource allocation decisions about which programs to fund, which to scale, which to discontinue, and increasingly those decisions are made in contexts that demand quantitative evidence of impact. Programs that can demonstrate measurable values outcomes, with clearly described instruments and replicable methods, are in a fundamentally stronger position to secure and sustain institutional support than programs that rely solely on testimonials and qualitative accounts, however compelling.

This argument is not a capitulation to audit culture. It is a recognition that if VbE is to move from the margins to the mainstream of educational practice, if it is to influence the design of curricula, the training of educators, and the priorities of institutions at scale, it needs to speak the language that shapes those conversations. Rigorous outcome evidence is that language. Building the capacity to generate it is not a betrayal of VbE’s values; it is a commitment to their realization.

The barriers to systematic measurement in VbE are real — practical, conceptual, and sometimes emotional. But they are not insurmountable. The instruments exist. The theoretical frameworks are in place. The emerging evidence base, while still limited, is accumulating. What is needed now is a shift in the norm of the field: from treating assessment as an optional add-on to treating it as an integral part of responsible VbE practice.

That shift serves everyone the field claims to serve. It serves current learners by giving educators the information they need to respond to who those learners actually are. It serves future learners by building the evidence base that makes rigorous, equitable VbE possible at scale. It serves the field by enabling VbE to make the kind of confident, evidence-grounded claims that sustain institutional investment and policy influence. And it serves the values themselves, because taking seriously whether our programs produce the changes we intend is what it means to be accountable to the goals we profess.

Acheson, K., Dirkx, J., & Shealy, C. (2022). High impact learning in higher education: Operationalizing the self-constructive outcomes. In E. Kostara, A. Gavrielatos, & D. Loads (Eds.), Transformative learning theory and praxis (pp. 172–196). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429450600

Hoggan, C. D. (2016). Transformative learning as a metatheory: Definition, criteria, and typology. Adult Education Quarterly, 66(1), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713615611216

Pang, G., & Acheson, K. (2025). Conceptualizing and measuring student transformation in international education with a quantitative assessment. Journal of Transformative Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/15413446251384856

Iseminger, S., Acheson-Clair, K., Kelly, C., & Morris, P. (2020). The effects of social identities on student learning outcome attainment. International Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 14(1), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2020.140112

Jaiswal, A., Smith, R. J., Diatta-Holgate, H., Morris, P. V., & Acheson, K. (2024). Comparing students’ multicultural awareness development in online vs. face-to-face diversity courses before, during, and after COVID-19. Trends in Higher Education, 3(4), 885–902. https://doi.org/10.3390/higheredu3040051

Luu, B. N., Phuong, H. Y., Ly, T. B. P., & Vo, P. Q. (2017). Factors inhibiting teachers from research engagement: A review. CTU Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, (06), 17-22. https://doi.org/10.22144/ctu.jen.2017.022 

Pang, G., Cox, R. C., & Acheson, K. (2023). Assessing transformative learning in international education: Critiques and new directions based on a systematic review of literature. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 2023(177), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.20480

Shealy, C. N. (2016). Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory. In C. N. Shealy (Ed.), Making sense of beliefs and values: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 113–173). Springer.

Wandschneider, E., Pysarchik, D. T., Sternberger, L. G., Ma, W., Acheson, K., et al. (2015). The Forum BEVI project. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 25(1), 150–228. https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v25i1.350

Wiley, J. L., Wiley, K. R., Intolubbe-Chmil, L., Bhuyan, D., & Acheson, K. (2021). A new, depth-based quantitative approach to assessing transformative learning. Journal of Transformative Education, 19(4), 400–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/15413446211045164