Case Study #9: Academic Assessment – Learning Outcome Mapping

ISSUE:

Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) is a key factor in the ongoing accreditation of most community colleges. There are several commercial-off-the-shelf software packages that can aid in the implementation and documentation of the institution’s assessment program, but frequently these are expensive, have a steep learning curve, are difficult to achieve buy-in from faculty, and plus may not fit with the unique assessment approach promoted by the college’s assessment leaders. A customized system could address all of these issues, but would necessitate a comprehensive revisioning of a college’s assessment program, something many institutions do not have the internal capability to execute. One fundamental task that is a foundation of a quality assessment program is learning outcome mapping.

SOLUTION:

Many commercial software applications for learning assessment and accountability management systems (AMS) provide a comprehensive reporting structure for presenting academic assessment data for use by assessment practitioners. However, one institution that I worked with found that their AMS was not designed to adequately represent the hierarchy of learning outcomes and relationships from the institutional level down through the course level. We developed a learning outcome mapping system to uniquely provide and describe the complex web of associations between four levels of learning outcomes: Course, General Education, Program, and Institutional. One-time mapping was done by the discipline faculty through individual Excel course workbooks (one per course), an example of which is shown below. To avoid misspellings and other user entry errors, all mapped outcomes (Institutional and GenEd) were provided through dropdown boxes in their respective cells. As some learning outcomes had sublevel outcomes, subsequent dropdown box options changed dynamically as a higher-level option was selected. The result is a workbook for each course that details how its specific learning outcomes support the general education and overall institutional outcomes at the college.

This outcome mapping network was used in the overall assessment process. To determine where students are learning successfully and where students are having difficulty, course level learning outcomes are measured at the course level. This allows discipline faculty to evaluate their teaching strategies and make improvements to the curriculum at the class level. Because each course outcome is mapped to an institutional outcome, the results from course level assessment can be “rolled up” to the institutional and general education levels to report college-wide results for accountability. Hence there is no need to directly measure the higher-level outcomes. As student achievement improves at the course level, the effects will ultimately “ripple up” to the institutional accountability level.