Improving Student Learning
Outcomes assessment is most useful when you are strategic about how to present, reflect on, report on, and act on results. The greater the amount of information you make available about individual, course, and program efforts, the more valid and reliable the assessment will be.
Merely presenting assessment results does not provide a complete accounting of student learning. Further inquiry into the meaning of the results is necessary to drive improvement. Analysis has to be higher-order, that is, deeper and reliant on synthesis. It’s not as simple as knowing the percentage of students who achieved a particular score. Go beyond that to question what the results mean. Think about what might explain the data by reflecting on questions like:
- Do our results tell us what we already know or tell us something new?
- What do we think about what has happened so far?
- Are our targets meaningful?
By reporting your assessment results both internally and externally, you meet responsibilities to faculty, students, institution, and the public. Using assessment results internally, or within programs, can improve day-to-day decision making about curriculum. It allows you to make deliberate, data-based decisions rather than reactive ones. One advantage of this is that more of your decisions will be in alignment with stated goals and outcomes.
Reporting assessment results also will allow you to establish best practices, which will improve student learning in a couple of ways.
- First, you’ll be setting standards for your program that will impact the culture. Over time, you’ll see that faculty and staff have greater shared understanding about what happens within a program and what needs to be done.
- Second, you’ll be building institutional knowledge about what works most successfully in your area. Successes will be documented and become part of the structure.