Academic Program Assessment

Washington and Lee University Accreditation and Institutional Research Academic Program Assessment
Accreditation and Institutional Research

Academic program assessment is the process of systematically collecting, analyzing, and using data to understand and improve the activities and outcomes of a program of study. Program assessment extends beyond a single course to look at overarching questions related to student learning in Majors and Minors.

Academic Program Assessment at W&L

At Washington and Lee we call academic program assessment Assurance of Learning, or AoL for short. The AoL process is a three-year cycle of planning, data collection, and improvement. Each year of the cycle, academic programs will focus on a different aspect of the assessment process.

The triennial cycle helps support assessment efforts that are aligned with learning outcomes, that produce actionable data, and that are sustainable in a world with many demands on an educator’s attention. The longer cycle allows programs time to discuss assessment results in order to translate them to meaningful programmatic improvements.

Assessment Plan

Mission and Goals

Define the values and goals of your program, the foundation from which everything else follows.

Crafting Learning Outcomes

Write specific, measurable SLOs using best practices and examples.

Curriculum Mapping

See where students develop each outcome and identify where to collect assessment data.

Assessment Measures

Choose methods that give you geniune evidence of learning, including rubrics for scoring student work.

Collecting and Using Assessment Results

Analyzing Results

Interpret your data and structure a faculty conversation around your findings.

Making Changes

Connect findings to specific improvement grounded in the assessment data.