Assessment at UNO Now and in the Future
Sheri Rogers, Associate Vice Chancellor and Director of Assessment
UNO’s decision to take the Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP) path to accreditation has made it imperative that we move forward in articulating our expectations for student learning at all levels. This means that we must clearly state:
- What students will know and be able to do
- How we will know it
- How we are going to use the information we collect to continuously improve student learning and other important university systems and processes
Thus, the first step in achieving continuous improvement is the clear articulation of measurable learning outcomes.
We need to show through UNO’s Systems Portfolio that we are making adjustments based on assessment evidence–changes that illustrate we are “closing the loop” on assessment (i.e., using the measure to inform our instruction). It is not enough any longer to simply have a plan; rather, we must articulate expectations for students clearly, illustrate for students how they will meet these expectations, identify appropriate instruments/artifacts which actually measure the outcome (not just the easiest or most convenient), and then we must communicate the “value added.” This attention to accountability is also essential for the Strategic Framework set out by the Board of Regents for each UN campus.
UNO’s comprehensive ePortfolio system, myMAPP™ (Mapping Academic Performance through ePortfolios), allows us to articulate expectations and show what students know and are able to do. Rubrics also allow us to illustrate numerical growth in a way that shows the “value added.” ePortfolios are UNO’s most important AQIP Action Project.
Portfolios are a direct measure of student learning, they actually show what students know and are able to do. Surveys, which we continue to use answer our questions about student-perception, provide us a with a secondary or “indirect” measure of student learning, but that isn’t enough for our current assessment needs. This is because these kinds of indirect measures cannot tell us what students actually know and can do with what they know; at best, they simply tell us what students think they know and can do.
Thus we need direct measures of student learning, and the ePortfolio initiative now currently underway, myMAPP™/faculty, provides us with the chance to build ePortfolios (direct measures of student learning) for all our students. Our students want ePortfolios to illustrate what they’ve learned, and we need ePortfolios to show what value we have added during the four-ten years that they spend at UNO as undergraduate and graduate students.