How--examples to follow.

Background Information

Handbooks and Manuals

Examples

Helpful Links

Goals

 The principal goals of outcomes assessment are to 1) document institutional effectiveness and 2) provide a basis for ongoing improvement.  As faculty we rely on our disciplinary expertise to design academic programs that we assume will lead to students’ mastery of the subject area.   But how do we know that students have indeed mastered the requisite knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors?  And how can we improve the effectiveness of our programs to both keep up with developments in the discipline and to produce students who are even better prepared? 

The answer to these questions is assessment.  Assessment is essentially a systematic data-driven process by which we cease our reliance on intuition alone to direct improvements.  By assessing outcomes, we collect the relevant data needed for curricular review, and compile benchmarks needed for initiating curricular revision. 

Why do we need to do this?  Externally we are accountable to various constituencies including SACS and the BOR.  Internally, good assessment allows us to promote quality enhancement by providing us with the data needed to guide effective decision-making at all levels: programmatic changes, course revisions, and teaching modifications.  Once we know how we are doing, we will be able to figure out how to do it better.

Our goals for assessment are both formative (to improve) and summative (to prove).  Formative assessments are the types of assessment we do on an ongoing basis.  These include course-embedded assessment of specific content knowledge and skills, as well as of general education outcomes such as writing proficiency in the discipline.  Other formative assessments might result from a culminating project assigned in a capstone course, or from the scores earned on licensure exams.  These formative assessments constitute the data that we use both to examine the effectiveness of our courses and programs and to help us specify where improvements can be made.  Regular review of formative assessment evidence allows us to be responsive to the changing environment and to changing needs.

 Summative assessment provides the opportunity for programs to demonstrate what has been accomplished, and to review those accomplishments for strategic planning purposes in a way that can be persuasive to students, faculty, administration, and the larger community.  Ultimately summative assessment informs institutional strategic planning and resource allocation.  At Georgia State University summative assessment occurs systematically through the process of Academic Program Review.

 In order for these outcome assessment processes to achieve the desired effects (improvement and strategic planning), we must have specified both appropriate learning outcomes and appropriate assessments of those outcomes.

Types of Learning Outcomes