The Decennial Assessment Cycle is designed to make assessment more relevant to your department/program’s long-term goals, to directly link short-term assessment activities with the full cycle leading up to and following your program review, and to ease your workload by allowing your department/program to craft a long-term assessment plan that is most appropriate for your needs. Assessment activities, and a department or program’s response to assessment, is one important aspect of every self-study. Under this new plan, your department/program is the primary audience for your assessment data.
The Decennial Assessment Cycle is linked directly to your department/program’s external review cycle. In brief, your department/program will develop a ten-year Assessment Plan following your external review, integrating assessment activities with department/program goals and recommendations from the program review. In turn, assessment work done during the years leading up to the next program review will directly support your next self-study and help your department/program prepare for that review.
Your Decennial Assessment Plan will be designed by members of your department/program with your students’ learning in mind. Plans will differ significantly among departments/programs and will ideally reflect each program’s specific concerns and aspirations as they develop in the period following the program review.
Overview
Respond (to External Review)
The Decennial Cycle will begin with the external review. The department/program will consider how the external review and the broader response connects with its goals for student learning and therefore its intended learning outcomes (ILOs). This may lead to a process of revising ILOs. The department/program may wish to consider the following:
- What are the department/program’s broader goals for student learning over the next ten years? How will these goals be met through curriculum, pedagogy, hiring decisions, etc.?
- How might current or revised ILOs reflect these broader goals, and how can student learning be effectively assessed?
The next step will be devising a specific Assessment Plan for assessing ILOs over a ten-year period. This plan will involve at least three assessment activities during the decennial cycle that incorporate reflection on assessment findings. The plan should be designed to produce useful information that will be incorporated into the next self-study.
Assess (at least three assessment activities)
Ideally, assessment activities will together assess all department/program ILOs over the course of ten years. (Keep in mind that a single assessment activity might be used to assess more than one ILO.) A department/program may wish to continue a current trajectory of assessment, or create a new plan. Learning outcomes may be assessed directly (looking at student work) and/or indirectly (surveys, etc.); in general, indirect assessment gathers student self-reported data and direct assessment collects actual examples of student performance.
Anticipate (the next review)
This phase of the decennial cycle is designed to incorporate a final assessment activity in preparation for writing the department/program’s self-study. The final step is writing the self-study for the next external review. Among the questions you may consider:
- What assessment activities has the department/program already done? Is there a significant missing piece? How might the final assessment activity create a more comprehensive picture of student learning overall?
- Are there specific questions the department/program is asking in anticipation of the self-study that might be answered by a specific assessment activity?
Examples of different ways departments/programs may approach the Decennial Assessment Plan
- Some departments/programs may initiate significant curricular changes in response to their external review. Such changes may involve revising ILOs as a first step. Another strategy may involve assessing a given ILO prior to, and again after, curricular changes are made.
- Some departments/programs may have grown or changed in relation to recent hires. Such departments may consider how these changes might intersect with student learning and consider ways to assess that learning.
- Some departments/programs may decide that one or more of their ILOs are not easily accessible, or more like “goals” than learning outcomes. This may also involve revising ILOs as a first step.
- Departments/programs that already use external assessment instruments or credentialing activities may consider how best to incorporate these into their Decennial Assessment Plan.
- Departments/programs that anticipate contributing to the OLE Core curriculum in new ways may consider the value of assessing an ILO meant specifically for the OLE Core.
- Departments/programs might look back at past assessment activities and consider the success or appropriateness of continuing those activities, and ask what might have been overlooked in past assessments.
Decennial Assessment Plan Details
As noted above, the Decennial Cycle will begin with the external review, move to the creation of a Decennial Assessment Plan, and typically involve three assessment activities that will provide information for the next program review.
A full Decennial Assessment Plan should:
- Incorporate assessment of each of the department/program ILOs.
- Schedule conversations around potential changes to the set of ILOs, if appropriate.
- Create specific action plans to address items raised during the external review process or in the final years of the previous decennial cycle.
- Schedule reassessment of student learning in areas in which actions have been taken during the cycle, thus closing the loop on prior assessment work.
- Identify two years within the decennial cycle in which Assessment Reports will be submitted to the Academic Assessment Committee. Reports will be due at the same time as department/program Annual Reports (first week of July).
A Program/Department Decennial Assessment Plan will be submitted to the Academic Assessment Committee for feedback following an external review. The deadlines for these plans will also be the same as for Annual Reports.