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Examples of Assessment by Institution |
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Lewis & Clark College: Since 2004, academic departments have been responsible for including in their annual reports a set of learning outcomes that they expect graduating seniors to have achieved and their evaluation of how well these goals were accomplished. Departments have considerable flexibility in developing methods appropriate to their discipline for defining and measuring outcomes, but are required to relate these outcomes to the broader purposes of an education in the liberal arts. The most frequent practice is for departments to use a capstone course or experience as the basis for assessing learning outcomes. This may take the form of a senior thesis, a recital or performance, or a visual art project. Other instruments used by some departments include comprehensive oral proficiency tests, and adaptations of standardized subject tests such as the GRE. The assessments conducted by departments are compared with items from the annual senior survey in which graduating students report their perceptions about the extent to which academic skills in the area of communication, writing, quantitative and scientific understanding, and information literacy have been enhanced by their education. The College has recently undertaken an analysis comparing results from the senior survey to answers from the same respondents five and ten years later to a set of similar items included on an alumni survey. Information from these various sources is providing departments and review committees an opportunity each year to evaluate the relevance of the curriculum to the longer term career aspirations of Lewis & Clark graduates.
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Lewis & Clark College |
