Kuh, G.D., Jankowski, N., Ikenberry, S.O., & Kinzie, J. (2014). Knowing What Students Know and Can Do: The Current State of Student Learning Outcomes Assessment in US Colleges and Universities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA).
This report shows how the impetus for gauging what students know and can do is no longer just an external mandate but increasingly is driven by the people responsible for the final product—faculty, staff, and institutional leaders. Indeed, substantial headway has been made in the past few years in the numbers and kinds of approaches campuses are using to assess student learning, with a welcome discernible shift toward the use of multiple measures and classroom-based approaches. The findings from this survey point to five areas that require immediate attention by institutional leaders, faculty and staff members, assessment professionals, and governing boards.
1. More faculty involvement is essential.
If there is one matter on which almost everyone agrees—administrators, rank-and-file faculty members, and assessment scholars—it is that faculty involvement in assessment and improvement is essential to both improve teaching and learning and to enhance institutional effectiveness. While faculty routinely “assess” their students’ learning through papers, tests, other tasks, the nature of student work is not always closely aligned with stated course, program or institutional outcomes. Teaching and learning centers can make an important contribution to the assessment agenda by offering workshops and consultations that help faculty design classroom-based assignments that both address the respective faculty member’s interest in determining whether his or her students are learning what is intended as well as provide evidence about student learning that can be used to represent institutional effectiveness.
Another promising faculty development approach is to situate assessment as a curricular review function, either in the context of the disciplines or the general education program. A template such as the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) (Lumina Foundation, 2011) can be used to guide a curricular mapping process for either the general education program or individual major fields to determine which outcomes are being addressed sufficiently in terms of breadth and depth and which need more attention. The key to using such an exercise to full advantage is to emphasize the essential role of assignments in inducing students to demonstrate what they know and can do and to use this information to document whether students are, indeed, achieving the proficiency levels stipulated by the institution and their major field (Ewell, 2013). Doing so returns the responsibility for determining whether students are learning what the institution promises to the faculty where it belongs.
2. Sustaining the recent progress in institutional assessment work must be a priority.
Leadership turnover and constrained resources threaten continued support for assessment, which makes it critical to integrate assessment work into the institution’s governance and reward structures. Also, finding ways to embed assessment within the core work of faculty and staff is increasingly crucial. Such observations point to the need for cultural change so that every unit embraces, values, and rewards student learning outcomes assessment.
At the same time, one size does not fit all. What an institution needs to advance assessment work will surely vary in some ways that differ from the aggregated prioritized needs reported by provosts, depending on the campus context and the stage at which an institution is in implementing its assessment program.
3. Colleges and universities must use assessment results more effectively.
Although the use of assessment evidence appears to be increasing, it is not nearly as pervasive as it must be to guide institutional actions that will improve student outcomes. This is by far the most disappointing finding from the survey.
To enhance student accomplishment, an institutional assessment program must purposefully focus on questions and issues that are central to attaining the institution’s educational mission and that will produce actionable evidence. Key to such an effort is integrating assessment work into the institution’s governance and organizational structures. For example, assessment activities and results should be used to inform faculty and staff development programs sponsored by teaching and learning centers. It is also important that assessment work at every level—classroom, program, and institution—be recognized and rewarded, institutional features that were not viewed by the majority of provosts as particularly supportive of student learning outcomes assessment.
Another area that needs attention on many campuses is the capture of evidence of student learning that occurs outside of the classroom, laboratory, and studio. Student affairs professionals, librarians, and others who have ongoing contact with students can add important perspectives to an assessment program, especially for interpreting and using the results and generating ideas for policies and practices that could enhance student performance. Equally important, the professional organizations of both groups are very interested in their members collaborating with their faculty colleagues on this important work. Students themselves should be regularly asked to help interpret assessment results and offer ideas to improve their learning.
4. Governing boards must make student learning a continuing high priority.
On some campuses, governing board members have been coached to shy away from questions of academic quality because the issues are too complex and beyond the board’s expertise. Moreover, assessing student learning is what faculty members do, not the board. Granted, gathering and using evidence of student learning is a complex undertaking and faculty and academic leaders are rightfully the daily arbiters of academic quality. Too often, however, the results of assessments of student learning outcomes do not lead to action. The board should expect to see annually a comprehensive set of student learning indictors and enough examples of productive use of assessment to be confident that the internal academic quality controls of the institution are operating effectively. In addition, governing boards must encourage and support the president, provosts, and other institutional leaders to make sure these issues are given proper priority on an already crowded institutional agenda.
5. Colleges and universities must cultivate an institutional culture that values gathering and using student outcomes data as integral to fostering student success and increasing institutional effectiveness—as contrasted with a compliance exercise.
The goal is to get everyone—faculty, administrators, and staff—to see that assessing outcomes and using evidence for ongoing improvement is not just or primarily an obligatory response to demands from outside the institution. Rather, assessment must be viewed and undertaken as a continuous improvement process yielding actionable information for faculty and staff as well as for institutional leaders. A key element of this culture-bending effort is explaining and communicating better to specific audiences the assessment work underway and the value of this work. Some institutions appear to be well along in such efforts, but much is yet to be done.
Last Word
At most U.S. colleges and universities, more assessment activity is underway now than ever before. Institutions are applying a broader range of instruments and approaches to document student progress, and the use of this evidence appears to be increasing—albeit not fast enough. Some campuses are more advanced in this work than others, which is to be expected given the scale, complexity, and diversity of the enterprise. Much of what has been accomplished is relatively recent, and much of it has been in response to pressure from external entities.
At the same time, knowing what students know and can do is no longer driven exclusively—or even primarily—by external forces, especially if accreditation is viewed as a hybrid of self-imposed and external oversight. Indeed, colleges and universities themselves have every reason to take ownership of assessment of student learning and to use that evidence wisely and productively. While accreditation remains the prime driver of assessment activity, joining it today are a campus’s own drivers—to improve teaching and learning, to assess effectiveness of current practice, and to heed presidential and governing board interests. This leads us to conclude that U.S. higher education has turned a corner in the assessment of student learning. Carrying out this important work is more appropriately and promisingly driven by a balance of compliance and institutional desire to improve.
The developments represented in the NILOA survey results suggest that American higher education may be on the verge of an inflection point where what comes next is a more purposeful use of evidence of student learning outcomes in decision making—which, in turn, has the potential to enhance academic quality and institutional effectiveness. To realize this promise sooner rather than later, colleges and universities must evolve from a culture of compliance to a culture of evidence-based decision making in which policies and practices are informed and evaluated by the ultimate yardstick: a measurable, positive impact on student learning and success.
Read here the abridged version of the full report.
