Assessment Of Learning Outcomes In Higher Education

This book examines important advances and offers a realistic image of the state of the art in student learning outcomes assessment in higher education—a field close to the core of nearly every higher education institution. Producing sound information on what students know and can do is critical to higher education practitioners and future social prosperity. Spanning international, national and institutional developments, the book presents methodological and empirical insights, highlights research challenges, and showcases the enormous progress made in recent years. The book will be of interest to researchers in education assessment and neighbouring fields, and stakeholders like institutional leaders, teachers and graduate employers looking for better insight on returns, governments searching for information to assist with funding and regulation, and members of the public wanting more clarity about outcomes and public investment. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current, innovative approaches to assessing generic and domain-specific learning outcomes in higher education at both national and international levels. It discusses the most significant initiatives over the past decade to develop objective, valid, and reliable assessment tools and presents state-of-the-art procedures to adapt and validate them for use in other countries. The authors highlight key conceptual and methodological challenges connected with intra-national and cross-national assessment of learning outcomes in higher education; introduce novel approaches to improving assessment, evaluation, testing, and measurement practices; and offer exemplary implementation frameworks. Further, they examine the results of and lessons learned from various recent, world-renowned research programs and feasibility studies, and present results from their own studies to provide new insights into how to draw valid conclusions about learning outcomes achieved in various contexts.

This book provides university teachers, leaders and policymakers with insights on current works on assessing students' learning outcomes around the world. It is founded in research, shaped by policy and designed to be of enduring relevance to practice. Framed by a cycle of quality improvement, it discusses policy contexts and research concepts.

In educational institutions, outcome-based education (OBE) remains crucial in measuring how certain teaching techniques are impacting the students’ ability to learn. Currently, these changes in students are mapped by analyzing the objectives and outcomes of certain learning processes. International accreditation agencies and quality assessment networks are all focusing on mapping between outcomes and objectives. The need of assessment tools arises that can provide a genuine mapping in the global context so that students or learners can achieve expected objectives. Assessment Tools for Mapping Learning Outcomes With Learning Objectives is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the implementation of quality assessment methods for measuring the outcomes of select learning processes on students. While highlighting topics such as quality assessment, effective employability, and student learning objectives, this book is ideally designed for students, administrators, policymakers, researchers, academicians, practitioners, managers, executives, strategists, and educators seeking current research on the application of modern mapping tools for assessing student learning outcomes in higher education.

There has been a remarkable growth of interest in the assessment of student learning and its relation to the process of learning in higher education over the past ten years. This interest has been expressed in various ways – through large scale research projects, international conferences, the development of principles of assessment that supports learning, a growing awareness of the role of feedback as an integral part of the learning process, and the publication of exemplary assessment practices. At the same time, more limited attention has been given to the underlying nature of assessment, to the concerns that arise when assessment is construed as a measurement process, and to the role of judgement in evaluating the quality of students’ work. It is now timely to take stock of some of the critical concepts that underpin our understanding of the multifarious relationships between assessment and learning, and to explicate the nature of assessment as judgement. Despite the recent growth in interest noted above, assessment in higher education remains under-conceptualized. This book seeks to make a significant contribution to conceptualizing key aspects of assessment, learning and judgement.

An ambitious, comprehensive reimagining of 21st century higher education Improving Quality in American Higher Education outlines the fundamental concepts and competencies society demands from today's college graduates, and provides a vision of the future for students, faculty, and administrators. Based on a national, multidisciplinary effort to define and measure learning outcomes—the Measuring College Learning project—this book identifies 'essential concepts and competencies' for six disciplines. These essential concepts and competencies represent efforts towards articulating a consensus among faculty in biology, business, communication, economics, history, and sociology—disciplines that account for nearly 40 percent of undergraduate majors in the United States. Contributions from thought leaders in higher education, including Ira Katznelson, George Kuh, and Carol Geary Schneider, offer expert perspectives and persuasive arguments for the need for greater clarity, intentionality, and quality in U.S. higher education. College faculty are our best resource for improving the quality of undergraduate education. This book offers a path forward based on faculty perspectives nationwide: Clarify program structure and aims Articulate high-quality learning goals Rigorously measure student progress Prioritize higher order competencies and disciplinarily grounded conceptual understandings A culmination of over two years of efforts by faculty and association leaders from six disciplines, this book distills the national conversation into a delineated set of fundamental ideas and practices, and advocates for the development and use of rigorous assessment tools that are valued by faculty, students, and society. Improving Quality in American Higher Education brings faculty voices to the fore of the conversation and offers an insightful look at the state of higher education, and a realistic strategy for better serving our students.

Assessment has provided educational institutions with information about student learning outcomes and the quality of education for many decades. But has it informed practice and been fully incorporated into the learning cycle? Conrad and Openo argue that the potential inherent in many of the new learning environments being explored by educators and students has not been fully realized. In this investigation of a variety of assessment methods and learning approaches, the authors aim to discover the tools that engage learners and authentically evaluate education. They insist that moving to new learning environments, specifically those online and at a distance, afford opportunities for educators to adopt only the best practices of traditional face-to-face assessment while exploring evaluation tools made available by a digital learning environment in the hopes of arriving at methods that capture the widest set of learner skills and attributes.

Assessment is a value-laden activity surrounded by debates about academic standards, preparing students for employment, measuring quality and providing incentives. There is substantial evidence that assessment, rather than teaching, has the major influence on students’ learning. It directs attention to what is important and acts as an incentive for study. This book revisits assessment in higher education, examining it from the point of view of what assessment does and can do and argues that assessment should be seen as an act of informing judgement and proposes a way of integrating teaching, learning and assessment to better prepare students for a lifetime of learning. It is essential reading for practitioners and policy makers in higher education institutions in different countries, as well as for educational development and institutional research practitioners.