Defining Assessment and Why We Do It

 

 

• Providing learning opportunities
• Establishing learning goals
• Assessing student learning
• Using the results of assessment to improve student learning and the process itself.

Why We Assess Student Learning

Student learning is assessed to:

1. ensure that students are learning what we want them to learn.
2. provide an opportunity to make programmatic improvements based on assessments.
3. document student learning for interested stakeholders (the university as a whole, the CSU system, the state legislature, parents, students, outside accrediting agencies, and the general public).
4. to use valid and reliable evidence to demonstrate student learning and to improve it.

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General Principles of Assessment

Cal Poly’s assessment process is intended to embody the following principles:

• DESIGN  assessment efforts to be useful for multiple purposes and audiences
  including course improvement, program improvement, program review,
  external accreditation and WASC accreditation.
• GATHER useful assessment evidence efficiently; this includes encouraging externally accredited programs to use their existing assessment efforts to fulfill university assessment expectations to the degree possible.
• SUPPORT programs with resources to help with assessment, including rubrics, descriptions of best practices, model timetables, model reports, model evidence collection and storage practices, and so on.
• EMPOWER faculty and programs with maximum feasible control over how and when they assess their Program Learning Objectives (PLOs).
• CENTRALIZE and standardize evidence collection and storage, and make assessment evidence easily available to programs.
• REAFFIRM that assessment evidence is not to be used to evaluate individual faculty members or in the RPT process.

These processes were agreed on by the Academic Assessment Council in Spring 2013.