The Assessment Plan

An assessment plan is a systematic and explicit way to answer the questions:  what is it that students can do when they graduate from an academic program, and how do we know they can do it?  Moving beyond individual performance and course grades, it is process that focuses on faculty-determined collective student learning at the programmatic level and is used to inform and improve teaching and learning. 

Assessment plans are reflective of each academic department’s mission, values, and learning goals.  Because they are individually crafted, learning goals, assessment methods, and use of assessment data will vary from department to department.  Although there is no official “template” for an assessment plan, it should reflect the following components: 

1. Learning Outcomes.  These are statements which describe the desired learning.  They reflect the kinds of knowledge, abilities, or dispositions which a graduate from a particular program should be able to demonstrate.  The most effective and easily measured outcomes are those which rely on active verbs to describe learning, such as analyze, construct, create, design, interpret, or calculate.

1. Assessment Methods.  Assessment methods are the means by which the learning outcomes are measured.  There are both direct and indirect methods of assessment.  (See Assessment Methods for a sample listing).  Methods chosen should be meaningful to the program---in other words, collect data that will be useful in answering the questions you have about student learning in your programmatic area of study.  Collect data from different sources in order to build a strong program of assessment.  Indirect measures, such as surveys of student satisfaction, are valid means of assessment but they only allow you to know students’ perceptions of their learning experience.  They are not direct measures of what a student knows or can do as a demonstration of programmatic learning outcomes. 

1. Data Analysis.  After data has been collected, it needs to be analyzed.  What did the results tell you about collective student learning in the particular areas you measured? 

1. Using Assessment Data.  The assessment process is only useful if the results of assessment are used to improve teaching and learning.  How was the data used?  What kinds of changes did you make as a result of what you learned from the assessments? 

1. Assessing the Change.  The last step in this process is to make a systematic and explicit determination about how effective the change was.  Did it accomplish what you wanted it to accomplish?  In order to answer that question one needs to “go back” and assess again to see if the pattern of collective student learning changed in a meaningful way.