The author is an outgoing faculty chair of the college assessment committee (CAC) at Moravian College. In this article, he shares the learned principles and constructive practices that guided his ten years of successful progress in fostering assessment: (1) Assessment must be part of the strategic plan; (2) Assessment language must be consistently…

For several years, the author has coordinated the introductory business course for freshmen, GB101: World of Business, at Bentley College. Recently, another faculty member and the author redesigned the course based on assurance of learning principles. The redesign of GB101 did not change the basic description or goals of the course but did not…

Over the past few years, the author had the good fortune to engage many faculty and administrators in conversations about student outcomes assessment. The author has discovered that many faculty and administrators associate course valuations with student outcomes assessment measures. He also found that no items about student learning outcomes are…

When the final report of Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was released in September 2006, the call for higher education to focus on measuring and reporting "meaningful student learning outcomes" was a major charge. The report's suggestion that some standardized tests might be used to collect…

In the author's position as director of institutional effectiveness and currently as a department assessment chair, he relates that he has found it useful to use an analogy between flossing one's teeth and instituting assessment. There are more similarities between flossing and assessment than one might imagine. In this article, the author…

The standard approach to advisement in most departments at Rowan University is to assign students to faculty members. Some departments may have one person with release time to do all the advising. Properly examining the courses and programs in which undergraduate students are progressing is an appropriate topic of concern. One way to handle such…

A persistent conflict between assessment professionals and faculty members in the humanities seems to focus inevitably on resistance to the concept of interrater reliability. While humanities faculty are often willing to engage in course-embedded assessment that uses some type of scoring rubric, when the demand for agreement in scoring is…

Determining the success of a general education program can resemble the task of John Godfrey's six blind men in trying to acquaint themselves with an elephant. One man's approach is to feel the tusk and conclude that the elephant is a spear. Another approach leads to thinking that the broad side of the animal is a wall. The many ways of asking and…

Assessment is about measuring the outcomes of learning. How do students get from learning catalyst to product? How do educators assist them in getting there? And how can it be determined that the student is moving toward appropriate learning goals? These are particularly important questions for educators who are engaged in the development of…

Western Governors University (WGU) was founded by the governors of sixteen western states to help meet the challenges presented by escalating enrollments and rising costs of higher education in their states. WGU promises to help their students "achieve their dreams for a degree and career success by providing a personal, flexible, and affordable…

Why is the implementation of learning outcomes assessment in higher education proceeding so grudgingly? When assessment results are obtained, why are they so rarely integrated into the strategic planning process? These questions remain prominent in spite of over a decade of intensive effort on the part of educational accrediting agencies to…

Creating opportunities to share student learning and assessment resources with faculty face- to-face can be a daunting challenge. At Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, Arizona, leaders representing six different service units and committees have developed a collaborative approach of "unite and conquer," in which the human, technical,…

The college president's role in supporting and promoting student learning outcomes and institutional assessment is a herculean one. At Guam Community College (GCC), the president has been performing a crucial role in setting an assessment example for the rest of the college community since he took office on June 16, 2001. Seeking to model an…

In 2004, the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan) was charged by the dean to implement a strategic, comprehensive assessment program within its complex academic environment. The overarching goal of the assessment program was to assess practices in all programs, using common…

In Autumn 2004, the Student Affairs Division of West Virginia University (WVU) began an intentional process of integrating assessment across units within the division. The vice president for student affairs initiated this direction in order to encourage the university's student affairs professionals to embrace their roles as educators who care…