What is the Program Assessment tool?
The Program Assessment tool helps institutions measure the effectiveness of their learning programs. The Program Assessment tool builds on the Course Level Assessment tool by allowing institutions to coordinate and facilitate a second set of reviews outside of the course, using a different rubric and different reviewers.
Terminology
The Program Assessment tool uses the following terms and definitions:
- Program: The program through which students are learning
- Learning Outcome: The set of skills or competencies that should be obtained by students through the program
- Course: One of the ways that learning outcomes are delivered to students, typically within a program
- Assignment: Work that is performed by students (typically within a course), which can be used to demonstrate learning or competencies
- Collections: A group of artifacts (typically assignment submissions) that will be evaluated using a rubric
- Sample Set: A subset of the total artifacts within a collection
- Assessment: The activity of evaluating a program to measure student learning outcomes
- Artifact: A work sample that demonstrates the competencies learned by a student
- Coordinator: The people responsible for defining and facilitating an assessment
- Evaluator: The people responsible for evaluating work within an assessment or collection
Assessment Workflow
The typical workflow for a program assessment includes a coordinator creating an assessment and curating a collection of artifacts. The coordinator will add a rubric and learning outcomes against which evaluators will review the artifacts.
Evaluators will then review the artifacts against the assessment's rubric and learning outcomes.
Once reviews are complete, Coordinators can view a summary of the collected data and generate reports to help measure the program's effectiveness.
