The Office of Academic Assessment is working with faculty to implement Canvas Outcomes as an institution-wide tool for engaging in meaningful, instructor-driven assessment of student learning. Our goal is to create a sustainable process for assessing students' achievement of the learning outcomes established by each department for their majors and programs.
We believe that:
"Assessment is an ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning. It involves making our expectations explicit and public; setting appropriate criteria and high standards for learning; … gathering, analyzing, and interpreting evidence[;] … and using the resulting information.”
~ Tom Angelo, Emeritus Professor of Education Innovation & Research
Following on the definition from Tom Angelo you see here, and on the work of Natasha Jankowski, we define assessment as:
Our definition of assessment centers students and instructors first and foremost, while also meeting our institutional obligations to show evidence of academic excellence. We believe it’s important to collect information about students’ achievement of departments’ learning outcomes in order to inform program decisions and enhance learning.
To achieve these goals, OAA is working to implement Canvas Outcomes so that, ultimately, we can engage all instructors in a sustainable way and begin to provide much more rich and meaningful information about student learning to departments. A visual representation of the Canvas Outcomes cycle is included below. In this section of the website, you will also find information on how to use Canvas Outcomes in individual courses, a repository of our program learning outcomes rubrics, and reports on our progress.
