As an institution in which excellence in teaching continues as the overriding goal, UIS has an obligation to look carefully and systematically at what its students learn – in other words, to assess learning outcomes. We need to assess student learning because we are accountable to external audiences. But, more importantly, we need to assess student learning because we want to know whether what students are actually learning is what we think they are learning.
This report addresses the following question:
To what extent is there an institution-wide understanding and implementation of the strategies that can be used by academic programs to conduct an effective assessment program?
To assist in the analysis of this issue, in the spring of 2004 each degree-granting program at UIS was asked to submit information about their program’s assessment practices.[1] The purpose of this report is to analyze and summarize those submissions and, in effect, to describe the state of assessment of learning outcomes among academic programs at UIS.
[1] The teacher education undergraduate minor is included in this analysis due to the large number of students pursuing this minor. The Environmental Studies M.A. and Environmental Sciences M.S. are combined for the purposes of this analysis. [ more ]
