In March 2020, institutions abruptly pivoted to remote instruction, sending students, faculty, and staff away from college campuses in response to COVID-19. In June 2020, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) launched a survey to capture a snapshot of assessment-related changes made during Spring 2020 in response to the…

Entering into a new decade with an even more diversified college student population will not only require more assessment models involving students but also deeper professional development of institutional representatives key to student learning. Reflecting upon the conversations over the last three years around culturally responsive assessment…

This Occasional Paper outlines lessons learned about mapping and assessing learning in student affairs and student employment. Over the last three years, the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) assisted institutions developing Comprehensive Learner Records and scaling high-impact practices. In each of these initiatives,…

Traditionally, transcripts present a collection of lists of courses and grades in a format valuable for trading information between and among institutions of higher education. What if transcripts were reimagined to not only provide information on credits earned, but also provide information on learning acquired both inside and outside the…

As colleges educate a more diverse and global student population, there is increased need to ensure every student succeeds regardless of their differences. This paper explores the relationship between equity and assessment, addressing the question: how consequential can assessment be to learning when assessment approaches may not be inclusive of…

Designing the tasks that students are required to complete in their courses has always been an essential part of what faculty do as teachers, and many faculty members work hard to shape and reshape those tasks in ways that bring out the best in students. But such work has mostly been done behind the scenes. A growing number of programs, campuses,…

Following the release of the Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) in 2011, many institutions of various types tried out different ways to use the DQP. Although over 680 institutions have used the DQP to date, until now the impact of the DQP on institutions and students has not been documented in a systematic manner. To determine the effects of DQP…

Tuning is a bottom-up, faculty-led process which leads to the creation of a discipline-specific learning outcome document along with a degree profile that is used to communicate the value of a particular degree to a variety of audiences including students, employers, policy makers, and the general public. Tuning, introduced in the United States in…

The Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) first released by Lumina Foundation in 2011 and revised in 2014 sets forth a vision of what students should know and be able to do at the associate, bachelor's, and master's levels. It also carries an important message about assessment. Unlike the popular model of assessment as a sampling of…

This publication presents a series of studies that the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) staff, led by Staci Provezis and Natasha Jankowski, conducted over the past couple of years. It may be the most comprehensive examination yet of institutional transparency in terms of student learning outcomes and the assessment…