For existing programs, assessment activities phase in over a 5-year timeline (Academic year 2021-22 through 2025-26). A small number of departments worked on learning objectives for their undergraduate programs in AY 21-22. The remaining undergraduate programs (except those with external program-level accreditation) work on them in AY 22-23 or AY 23-24. Graduate programs (except those with external program-level accreditation) work on learning objectives in AY 24-25 or AY 25-26.

Programs with their own specialized accreditation already undergo assessment of student learning outcomes and therefore will not submit assessment reports to USLAC. All programs, regardless of accreditation status, should have program-level learning objectives in the University's catalog.

During development, new academic programs will define objectives, map courses and assessments, define key performance indicators of student success, and develop an assessment plan. Once the academic program is approved and begins enrolling students in the major, assessment reporting will also begin.

Yes! You are not alone in this process. The Office of Academic Program Assessment staff are available to work with academic programs on assessment activities. The goal is to create a simple, sustainable process that leverages existing structures and resources. Reach out to assessment@uconn.edu with questions or to schedule a time to meet.

The Office of Academic Program Assessment and CETL also offer workshops related to assessment of student learning. A list of upcoming workshops is available at https://fins.uconn.edu/

The work we are doing at UConn is informed by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) framework on Equity in Assessment. You can look at this framework and a range of resources to begin thinking about what equity in assessment might mean for your unit here.

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning offers programming on creating equitable learning experiences. Check out their resources and workshops.

Institutional Research has dashboards available that provide program-specific data that can help your program in answering your diversity, equity, and inclusion questions. Programs can submit data requests to Institutional Research and to the Registrar.

The Office of Academic Program Assessment can also assist in connecting you with University offices that may be able to provide data for other assessment needs. You are always welcome to reach out to assessment@uconn.edu to begin a conversation about what data you are looking for, for assistance in accessing current data, or assistance in collecting data going forward.

There is no ideal number but typically less than 10 objectives are sufficient. Thus far, some programs in the university have as few as 4 objectives while others have as many as 9 with an average of around 5 objectives. The number will vary by program. Faculty in each program determine how many objectives are needed to address the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students will achieve by the end of the program.

No, that is not the intent of developing learning objectives. The goal is, as a program, to develop learning objectives that match your current curriculum and academic priorities. Although the process is not intended to create curricular revision, the process could lead to curricular advancement. For some academic programs, the process has allowed them to identify gaps or redundancies in the curriculum which they wished to address. For other programs, the process has allowed them to identify ways to structure courses to meet the needs of all students.

No. While some programs have used the assessment cycle as an opportunity to create new assessment measures, such as capstone projects, this is purely a program choice. For those programs who do not wish to create new assessment measures, assessment of student learning outcomes can be built within the current curriculum and assessments.

There is nothing that prevents programs from moving forward with any planned curricular revisions, but changing the curriculum and assessments is not a goal of this initiative. We are assuming programs are starting from a strong position in terms of their current curricular structure.

Clearly articulating learning objectives that draw on your current curriculum and then exploring assessment data related to these objectives allows your program to highlight successes, as well as to dig deeper into student how well students are meeting your goals.

Although programs will have multiple program-level learning objectives, programs will submit a short report to the UConn Student Learning Assessment Committee on at least one of those learning objectives each year. Some programs have opted to report on more than one per year to allow them to assess all objectives within a shorter timeframe.

No. You should select assessments that strongly align with your program-level objectives. How many assessments this is varies significantly by program.

No. Similar to the selection of assessments, the program can select a subset of courses to include in their assessment plan. Some programs have selected to use assessment from all courses; some have selected a few course assessments from each level of the program; others have focused on a few assessments at the 3000 and 4000 levels only.

Many programs have this type of model with some core courses and a variety of elective options. An academic program does not need to assess all courses. The program can pick a representative sample that provides them with useful data. For some programs, the plan of study has groupings of courses (“pick 1 from this group” options) which may assist in picking courses to include but this is just one approach.

Yes. Every assessment does not need to include all students in the major.

You can…but StudentAdmin does not push across major information to HuskyCT so you won’t know which students are which. The goal is to assess the progress of students within the major but that does not preclude programs from taking the approach that works for them. Thus far we have seen a variety of approaches to address this. Some have not included courses with non-majors (particularly gen ed courses) in the assessment plan while some programs are comparing class rosters to students in the major to pull data only on those in the major. A program can also create their own model on how to address this.

Given that most faculty use HuskyCT, the Office of Academic Program Assessment is implementing Blackboard’s assessment software, known as Blackboard EAC, which helps programs to gather assessment data from HuskyCT. The Office of Academic Program Assessment can provide training to academic programs on how to utilize this system for data collection.

No. Programs are in no way obligated to use the software. We recognize that not all programs or faculty use HuskyCT. Even programs and faculty that use HuskyCT do so in very different ways. The University Student Learning Assessment Committee selected Blackboard EAC to assist interested programs in data gathering but there is no requirement to do so.

Yes. The Office of Academic Program Assessment can train faculty and programs on how to create alignments of objectives to assessments and run reports. The office will add the program’s learning objectives into HuskyCT and then work with the program to identify which assignments, exams, or grade center columns aligned to each objective.

The Office of Academic Program Assessment and the University Student Learning Assessment Committee created a template for report writing. The final reports are intended to be brief reports (three to five pages of narrative and supporting data). Direct support will be provided to programs as they write reports.

The first part of the report is a reflection on the impact of changes from the previous year’s finding. The second part is analysis of and reflection on direct and indirect outcomes data for at least one learning objective. The final portion is analysis of and reflection on key performance indicator of student success data.