What is Outcomes Assessment Projects?

Outcomes Assessment Projects:

A Simpler Path to More Meaningful Assessment

What is Outcomes Assessment Projects?

Outcomes Assessment Projects (OAP) is a streamlined outcomes-based assessment tool that allows institutions to collect student work products from a variety of courses and disciplines, and score such artifacts using standard rubrics. It addresses a critical challenge institutions face: Engaging in meaningful, sustainable assessment of student learning outcomes.

OAP is used to facilitate the collection of evidence of student learning, including:

• Assignments and student artifacts that are aligned to learning outcomes
• Qualitative and quantitative assessment data of this evidence
• Aggregated and disaggregated data by outcomes, courses and student demographics

This collected evidence, in turn, helps universities meet tightening accreditation standards and drive improvement with faculty.

An Assessment Coordinator creates an Assessment Project in OAP which identifies the learning outcomes and rubrics on which student performance will be measured. In addition to identifying the learning outcomes and rubrics, aCoordinator will also define the courses and disciplines from which student work will be pulled, and the individuals who will be conducting the scoring.

Custom rubrics may be developed using OAP’s intuitive rubric building tool, and student work may be uploaded intoOAP in several ways such as in bulk, or manually by a Coordinator. Alternatively, students may upload their own work from an institution’s Learning Management System. Once an Assessment Project has been deployed, individuals who have been identified as scorers may engage in a streamlined scoring experience.

Key Benefits of Outcomes Assessment Projects

• Offers an intuitive user experience for even the most technologically-challenged users
• Makes the assessment process more efficient -- it saves time
• Gets universities to outcomes-based data easily
• Allows for the collection of data to occur without student involvement

Standard Use-Cases of Outcomes Assessment Projects

• General Education Assessment
  • Student work is collected from a multitude of courses and disciplines across campus. This work is mapped to relevant outcomes/rubrics and scored by a committee of identified evaluators.

• Course-Based Assessment
  • Student work, collected at the course level, is scored by faculty members of record (at the individual
    course section level) and/or faculty associated with the course in general (across all sections).