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On or before June 30 each year, via .

You can find assessment documents and past Annual PLO Assessment Reports on the Program Learning Outcomes website. If your department documents on the site are outdated, please submit new assessment documents to the Office of Educational Effectiveness through the .

Sometimes circumstances arise that make it difficult to assess the PLO that was scheduled for any given year. Perhaps a certain class was not offered or enrollment was low and there is not enough student evidence to assess for program-level insights. There is flexibility from year to year on which PLO is assessed. If you need to assess a different PLO than what is on your schedule, please feel free to do so. However, keep in mind that over the 6-year assessment cycle (from one Academic Program Review to the next), you should have assessed each PLO at least once.

To determine what student evidence should be used for the PLO assessment, identify the course and assignment on your Assessment Plan where mastery of this PLO occurs. Assessment of direct evidence is required for each PLO. Indirect evidence may be used to supplement, but not replace, direct evidence.

• Direct evidence: student work from a course(s) (discipline field exams, research papers or projects, comprehensive exams, major presentations, exhibits, recitals, ePortfolios)
• Indirect evidence: surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

You may use evidence from a prior year! The report year refers to the year in which the assessment occurred and was reported, but not necessarily the year in which the student work was completed. For smaller programs, it may take 2-3 semesters to amass enough evidence of student learning to assess a PLO for program-level insights. Or, you may consider using evidence drawn from multiple years to conduct a longitudinal assessment. For typical annual PLO assessment, which is cross-sectional, we caution against using evidence drawn from more than 2 years before the report year (as it is meant to serve as a snapshot of recent teaching practice and student achievement).

Since good assessment practice should also be manageable, it is completely reasonable to select a random sample of assignments to assess. If you have a small sample size to begin with (e.g., 10 students), consider assessing the work of all students. If you have a large sample size (e.g., 100+ students) use your discretion to assess a subset that is representative enough to yield useful, generalizable evidence of student learning.

Faculty experience, coupled with random sampling, should yield a useful sample of student work for program level assessment. For example, your department may have 350 assignments that could be assessed for PLO mastery. Begin by assessing 10 assignments. At this point, most faculty will be able to determine if the results are reasonably representative of the students in their program. Though unlikely, if the results of the initial assessment seems to contradict the experience of the faculty members, they may select another 10 to assess, and so forth.

This depends. It may be that the curriculum in your program is set up in such a way that multiple assignments are designed to demonstrate mastery of a PLO. In this case, a general PLO rubric is essential because it provides common standards of performance for each assignment as it relates to the PLO. When using one capstone assignment to demonstrate mastery of a PLO, the assignment rubric may function as the PLO rubric if: (1) it evaluates every aspect of the PLO, and (2) aspects on the rubric that are not related to the PLO are not included in the assessment (e.g., points for grammar, punctuation, or formatting).

More than one faculty member should participate in PLO assessment. A team of department faculty that includes the professor(s) of the course from which the student work is drawn would be ideal. If you are a department of one, consider asking other Biola faculty in similar disciplines to help with the assessment work.

Please indicate: (1) the percentage of students who met expectations or achieved proficiency for each criterion of the rubric, (2) the percentage of students who met expectations or achieved proficiency for the PLO overall, and (3) your department benchmark and target for this PLO (e.g., 80% of students will achieve proficiency [meet expectations]). Attach any charts, rubrics or other evaluation materials used.

Sometimes there are no changes that need to be made, or perhaps changes were recently made and you want to observe their impact before making additional adjustments. Assessment should help reveal areas that could be improved, but it does not mean that you are required to make major changes every time a PLO is assessed. Most of the time, only small tweaks are required.

After you to the Office of Educational Effectiveness, it will be evaluated by the Educational Effectiveness Committee (a team of faculty members who have been trained in assessment) against the . The goal of this evaluation is to provide departments with helpful feedback on the assessment process. Then, for the sake of transparency and accountability to our stakeholders, key findings from the report will be shared on the Program Learning Outcomes website. Finally, when your department undergoes Academic Program Review, the faculty will be asked to reflect upon and summarize the impact of any improvements made as a result of annual PLO assessment, as described in the Annual PLO Assessment Reports.

Feel free to set up a consultation appointment with Kevin Pittle on the Office of Educational Effectiveness website - Training and Support. We are here to serve!