To help you more easily find the resources you need for student learning assessment, we have reorganized our pages and added new resources. To get started, we suggest you read An Assessment Walkthrough, a short document that previews the learning assessment cycle and offers suggestions for beginning or continuing your assessment work.
Student Learning Outcomes | Curriculum Mapping | Direct Measures: Rubrics & Tests | Closing the Loop
The Learning Assessment Loop
After we clarify the desired results of a course or program, stipulate what that learning looks like, and design the learning opportunity, we need a systematic way to find out if our backward design worked. Did students demonstrate the “desired results?” We use the learning assessment loop to analyze how effectively our course and curriculum designs have helped students to learn.
The learning assessment loop’s four steps help us to apply research-based best practices to improving student learning. The linked pages will help you to …
- Craft, clarify, and align student learning outcomes;
- Analyze learning opportunities through curriculum mapping;
- Measure student learning with direct measures; and
- Close the loop, or analyze and apply the learning results.
Additional Assessment Resources
- Leadership & Teaching Resources
- General Education Assessment Planning
- Program/Department Assessment Planning & Reporting
- Graduate Assessment Resources
- Outcome Alignment Worksheet
Begins with an example of vertical alignment, including a rubric and resulting direct evidence, then offers a worksheet to help you vertically align your student learning outcomes from the UMBC mission to your rubric or test. - Examples of Evidence of Student Learning
Lists examples of direct and indirect assessments. - Selected Learning Assessment References
Related Resources
- Effective Grading
Contains a section on rubrics with examples. - How to Use Blackboard to Measure Learning
Gives step-by-step instructions for crafting rubrics in Blackboard and accessing the aggregated data. - Adding Alignments in Blackboard-EAC
Explains how to connect tests and rubrics to outcomes to streamline some assessment processes.
Student Learning Outcomes | Curriculum Mapping | Direct Measures: Rubrics & Tests | Closing the Loop