In 2017, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research implemented a project to develop curriculum guidelines for all health and social care programmes. The modified RAND/UCLA appropriateness method used by the group developing guidelines for programmes in prosthetics and orthotics is described. The method resulted in 126 learning outcomes that…

Higher education institutions are commonly tasked with demonstrating student learning in and out of the classroom. Although academic and student affairs share a common goal of supporting student success, they frequently do not speak the same assessment language. This lack of alignment can lead to miscommunication and missed opportunities to…

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…

Learning outcome assessment is a fairly recent trend in higher education that began in the 1980s (Lubinescu et al., 2001). Today, many faculty perceive assessment reporting to be tedious, time-consuming, and irrelevant busywork (Wang & Hurley, 2012). Unfortunately, this systematic process created to use empirical evidence to measure, document,…

To facilitate familiarity and comfort with outcomes assessment, we map three sets of student affairs professional standards to the outcomes assessment cycle. Although the standards differ in focus (i.e., individual competencies versus program characteristics), the mapping showcases the immense similarity in expectations regarding the gathering of…

Programme Educational Objectives (PEOs) are specific goals that are aligned with the vision and mission of an institution of higher learning. The PEOs describe the expected achievements of the graduates in their career and professional accomplishment after graduation. At Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam, the…

Student learning outcomes assessment has been increasingly used in U.S. higher education institutions over the last 10 years, partly fueled by the recommendation from the Spellings Commission that institutions need to demonstrate more direct evidence of student learning. To respond to the Commission's call, various accountability initiatives have…

Improving higher education student learning plays a critical role in advancing human capital. Assessment lies at the heart of such improvement, underlining the need for research and innovation in this field. This article reviews an "AERA Open" Special Topic published to advance assessment research and hence the success of higher…

The world of higher education has been changing rapidly over the last 30 years with the move to mass education due to the needs of the knowledge economy for an appropriately skilled labour force and driven by continuous advances in technology. The purpose of this publication is to provide an overview of how quality assurance (QA) bodies are…

In 2016, Union County College began a four-year experiment with corequisite developmental mathematics as part of a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's First in the World (FITW) program. In this experiment, students assessed as needing to take developmental mathematics courses would be eligible to receive a waiver from their developmental…

Higher education institutions are continually striving to make education relevant to the working environment students will encounter upon graduation. One of the tools for enhancing an institution's quality and sufficiently informing students about their outcomes and learning opportunities is a quality assessment. Quality assessment is a long…

The trustworthiness of low-stakes assessment results largely depends on examinee effort, which can be measured by the amount of time examinees devote to items using solution behavior (SB) indices. Because SB indices are calculated for each item, they can be used to understand how examinee motivation changes across items within a test. Latent class…

Increasing the use of learning outcome assessments to inform educational decisions is a major challenge in higher education. For this study we used a sense-making theoretical perspective to guide an analysis of the relationship of information characteristics and faculty assessment knowledge and beliefs with the use of general education assessment…

A number of national and international organizations have compiled lists of grand challenges to unify the efforts of scholars and practitioners in a field. Unified efforts increase the possibility of creating meaningful and lasting progress. In this paper we share ten grand challenges that were identified through an examination of the assessment…

This report from JFF with a select group of community college practitioners, makes the case for policymakers, employers and practitioners to invest in and strengthen short-term credentialing programs to rapidly retrain unemployed workers for better career prospects, especially workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes key commitments…