Achievement target: The number, rate, percentage, and so forth that your program would consider an acceptable assessment finding.
Actions: What your program plans to do with your assessment results to improve teaching and learning or to improve your assessment methodology.
Assessment: A form of research designed to determine if students have in fact learned what our courses and other learning experiences are designed for them to learn.
Curriculum map: A visual tool showing the alignment between program-level outcomes and program courses.
Direct assessment: An assessment of students’ actual learning, evaluating, for example, projects and performances.
Embedded assessment: An assessment using methods already available in a course, such as a question on an exam, a group project, or a demonstration.
Findings: Your actual assessment results.
Indirect assessment: Typically an assessment of students’ perceptions of their learning, using, for instance, focus groups and surveys.
Learning outcome: A succinct statement of what you would like students to know or be able to do. Sometimes called an objective, an outcome may also refer to an attitude or a disposition. An outcome is measurable.
Learning goal: A statement about student learning that is more general than an outcome.
Measure: The tool that you plan to use to assess your selected outcome.
Rubric: An assessment tool that combines assessment criteria (e.g., correct grammar) with descriptions of different levels of achievement (e.g., meets expectations: a few non-distracting mechanical errors).
Triangulation: More than one piece of evidence comes to the same conclusion about student learning.