Assessment Plan Elements

This document intends to answer the question "What must the assessment plan include" and is addressed to departments or programs who are in the early stages of developing assessment plans. If you need additional consultation during development of your plan, your first line of assistance is the chair of your college's Curriculum and Assessment Committee. As someone who is at once a faculty member in your own college and a member of a campus-wide network concerned with academic planning and assessment, she/he can usually help you find solutions to assessment issues. A template document for assessment plans (in Word format) may be downloaded from the Curriculum Development Process Guide's Forms for Download page (see the Curriculum Forms section of this page).

Three Essential Elements

Every program's assessment plan includes three sets of statements:

1. a statement of the department's or program's purpose,
2. a series of intended student outcomes or objectives for the program, and
3. a series of assessment procedures and criteria by which the level of achievement in relation to the outcomes/objectives will be demonstrated.

UCA's assessment program has, thus far, focused on "student learning outcomes": though a program is legitimately assessed from many different perspectives, the assessment plans described here focus on program performance in relation to what a program expects or intends its graduates to know, be able to do, be aware of, and so forth.

Connecting the Elements

The three sets of statements listed above should be understood as directly connected, each part of the assessment plan being stated and read in relation to the part preceding it. Thus a department's or program's statement of purpose--insofar as it is related to student learning--is made concrete and specific in its objectives; the objectives are, in turn, directly addressed by the procedures and criteria designed to demonstrate student achievement of those objectives. For a visual representation of the connections among the parts of a submitted plan, see this archived (and possibly now superceded) plan for the BS in Computer Science (PDF document with markup).

Notes on the Elements

The notes that follow address in turn of the three parts in our basic program assessment plan. Every program, of course, must craft for those parts a content that fits its own particular nature, needs, intentions, and capabilities. For examples of plans developed by programs on campus, see the on-line Assessment Plan Library; please remember that although such examples can be useful, they should never be taken as infallible models or guides: a program's assessment plan is--and should be--its own.

Statement of Departmental/Program Purposes

Here the department or program states its overall goals within its larger contexts--its college and the University--though the assessment plan itself usually includes only the departmental or program purpose statement. Developing this part of the assessment plan offers an opportunity for departments and programs to reaffirm their specific roles within the university's more generally stated purposes. For UCA's Strategic Thinking Initiative, the university's Strategic Framework (adopted in 2004), and its statement of mission and principles, see the links under the heading Planning on the PandA home page.

Many departments find it useful to begin, at least, with the departmental statement of purpose published in the University Bulletin. Most departments write a single statement of purpose for all their programs, the programs themselves being distinguished by the specific list of intended outcomes or objectives. Some departments, however, bring together quite disparate programs, in which case a particular program's goal or purpose may be stated here following an overall departmental statement.

Intended Outcomes/Objectives

Here the plan specifies what the program's graduates will know, be able to do, and so forth. The program should attempt to summarize, in three to five clear statements, what it wants its students to achieve by their participation in the program.

Too many outcomes or objectives will prove unmanageable, especially for the assessing unit but also for its audiences--program faculty and students, the local campus outside the department/program, the larger non-specialist academic community, the general public, and the various agencies (most immediately and obviously the Higher Learning Commission) that will have occasion to review the plans and their results. The need to keep the outcome statements to a manageable number is particularly obvious when one remembers that each of the outcomes/objectives must be specifically assessed and that virtually everyone working with assessment recommends that multiple measures be developed for each objective.

The program will, for these reasons, want to be concise, clear, and specific in these statements, without burdening the largely non-specialist public audience of the plan with unnecessary detail.

Assessment Procedures and Criteria

In general, this part of the plan shows how the program will demonstrate a particular level of achievement of the outcomes projected under Intended Outcomes/Objectives. A program will want to begin by identifying the "points of assessment" built into the program and then to consider whether additional opportunities for evaluation need to be added.

The program will usually want to specify more than one way to demonstrate achievement in relation to each intended outcome ("multiple measures"), though conceivably some outcomes will be stated in such a way that they are adequately demonstrated by only one measure. A program may have a series of complex assessment measures already in place whereby it can demonstrate what its students have achieved: in such a case, a single statement, describing in detail a comprehensive measure, is appropriate. See, for example, this archived assessment plan developed for the BFA in Studio Art (PDF document with highlighting).

A program should always ask itself whether assessment procedures and their associated criteria actually, adequately, and specifically measure or demonstrate what the program has stated as intended outcomes.

A common problem noted in early assessment plan drafts is a failure to state a standard of success. That is, many plans begin by stating a procedure but fail to follow through by specifying criteria whereby achievement may be judged. Some examples of criteria:

• One standard of success might be a percentage of students projected to achieve some specified level of success: for example, "85% of graduating majors will pass the national licensure examination in _____ on their first attempt."
• Another common standard of success is an average outcome from a particular assessment procedure, sometimes with comparisons built in to the criterion: "Senior majors will take the MFAT in _____ during the semester before their graduation and will score at or above the national 50th percentile."
• Another standard, but one to be used with extreme caution, is GPA in a particular part of the required curriculum. For example, if a stated objective was the quite general "Students will demonstrate mastery of required basic science coursework," one measure of success might be stated this way: "Students will earn a ___ or better in required behavioral, biological, and physical sciences courses." Overall GPA within the major program is almost never a useful assessment criterion: it is simply not specific enough in the information it reveals about student achievement to be useful for either program improvement or accountability. For more on the use of GPA or grades, see now venerable working document GPA in Assessment: Cautionary Notes.

In some cases, a program may be unable to establish specific criteria before implementing an assessment plan. In such cases, the assessment plan should indicate when and how the program will establish standards for success. For example, a new program's assessment plan might indicate, "For all assessments, the first two review cycles will be used to establish baseline criteria for success in achieving these objectives."

If appropriate assessment procedures and criteria are already in place, they should, of course, be used: one need not reinvent the wheel if the wheel is already there. Likewise, the assessment elements of program accreditation--the College of Business Administration's accreditation by AACSB, for instance, or the music department's accreditation with the NASM--should be used as fully as possible to fulfill the program's obligations to the university's assessment program. If in doubt, ask.

APAC Considerations for Initial Assessment Plans

The following considerations are used by the university's Academic Planning and Assessment Committee (APAC) in its review of new programs' initial assessment plans. Programs may find these considerations useful in developing such plans.

APAC is not called on to pass judgment on programs per se: its concern is limited to the assessment plan, and the question to be answered by APAC is this: "Does this assessment plan provide the program with a reasonable starting point for assessment of student outcomes of the program?"

Every new program is required to write an assessment plan, but assessment plans for new programs must necessarily be understood to be preliminary: actual experience of the implemented program may very well suggest revisions to a proposed assessment plan.

Some appropriate questions for any assessment plan are as follows:

1. Are the objectives/outcomes (a) appropriately limited and (b) clearly stated?
2. Do assessment procedures and criteria offer, where appropriate and possible, multiple measures of objectives/outcomes?
3. Do the assessment procedures and criteria offer direct measures of student outcomes as well as indirect?
4. Are assessment criteria and procedures practical (i.e., possible to carry out and immediate or proximal enough to be likely in fact to be carried out)?

Note that numbers 2 and 4 sometimes must be balanced against each other. E.g., in a graduate program assessment plan, several objectives--perhaps a series of "knowledge" objectives--might have a single general measure (e.g., a comprehensive exam) associated with all of them, success related to the particular objectives being measured by parts of the general measure (e.g., particular parts of the comprehensive exam). Although other measures might be devised, the proposers would likely argue that the comprehensive is the natural and most practical place to expect degree candidates to demonstrate their knowledge.

A caution: We should be reluctant to approve measures whose criteria are simply (a) course completion (e.g., "All students will complete 18 hours of ___ ") or (b) grades/GPA targets.