Mission
The mission statement provides a clear and succinct description of the purpose of your department and the activities you undertake. The mission statement should indicate what group your program primarily serves (graduate students, undergraduates) and the most important learning outcomes. It should reflect university and college missions as well as the unique charge of your discipline.
Goals
Goals are overall, broad statements that expand on the mission of your program. Goal statements highlight the accomplishments you wish to achieve through the activities of your program.
Outcomes
Objectives and learning outcomes highlight the particular skills, knowledge, values and attitudes that you seek to develop in your students. Programs vary considerably in how many learning outcomes they identify.
- Direct: These measures directly assess student behaviors or products that are linked to identified learning outcomes. Papers, presentations, tests are all examples of direct measures.
- Indirect: These measures are based on a report of how well someone believes learning outcomes have been achieved. They may be reports of students, employers, graduates or faculty among others. Surveys and focus groups are examples of these types of measures.
Create Timeline
As part of the assessment plan programs should develop a timeline for implementation of the assessment plan. Some programs choose to assess all outcomes every year through an activity such as a capstone course. Other programs will choose to assess only some learning outcomes each year. For programs evaluating specific learning outcomes each year the assessment timeline should assure that all learning outcomes are assessed within each 5 year program review cycle.
Collect information on identified learning outcomes. There are many approaches to the assessment process. Examples include:
- Capstone courses
- Portfolios
- Embedded assessment
- Work samples
- Published tests
Evaluate Results:
Evaluating results may include quantitative or qualitative analysis of the data gathered. Often samples of direct measures may be used to streamline the assessment process. Triangulation, the process of accessing more than one data source is useful in validating assessment results. For example, the same learning outcomes may be assessed through a direct measure (an exit exam), and one or two indirect measures (student and employer report).
Respond to Results:
The purpose of program assessment is program improvement. Thus the previous activities are meaningless unless the information is used in larger program improvement efforts. Responding to results may include changes in the program such as course sequencing, new courses, changes in current courses but may also include celebrating results that indicate that the program is achieving desired learning outcomes.
Evaluate Plan for Next Year
Planning ahead will allow the program to collect necessary data in a timely manner. Prior or at the beginning of the new academic year, programs decide which learning outcomes they would like to assess during the upcoming year, re-evaluate their assessment plan, make changes to methods of collecting data or engage in any other activities that will facilitate program assessment for the upcoming year. In addition, programs should consider a long term plan for evaluating the results of any program changes made in response to previous assessment results.
5 Year Program Review
Each department on campus undertakes an extensive program review every five years. Departments that are required to provide a review for an outside accrediting agency do not need to complete the full program review. Rather they are asked to supplement their accreditation document with any information required as part of the CSUS program review that may not be a part of their accreditation review. As part of the program review process, departments are asked to use assessment data to evaluate how well students are meeting department learning expectations, University learning goals, writing and reading standards in the major and computer/information competence standards. Assessment plans should be structured in such a way that all learning outcomes are assessed during the five year cycle.
