Evaluation of Technological Systems that Promote Transparency in Quality Student Learning and Development

In order to capture the intricacies of learning and development that are taking place in each academic discipline and co-curricular specialization (e.g., student affairs/services) at varying institutional types and cultures, the faculty - the discipline experts themselves - must be able to plan, select, and deliver or facilitate the learning and development as well as the methods in which to identify whether the learning is occurring. In order for decisions to be made which will improve the facilitation of unique student learning and development, the information to identify learning must be gathered with great detail and in a manner that has meaning to the facilitators of the learning. In addition, this information must be documented in a way to demonstrate what has been discovered about learning, how it has been identified, and what decisions have been made in order to improve it. Such documentation requires a sophisticated web-enabled software system.

Such a system brings to reality the Commission on the Future of Higher Education's call for transparent quality of higher education while allowing faculty to determine the comparability of the learning across programs and across institutions. This system is called ASSESS and is still in the developmental stages.

ASSESS is a web-based assessment management system that accommodates course and program assessment process data. ASSESS captures the entire assessment process from data entry, storage and organization, through alignment of course and program outcomes to unit, division, institution, state, system, professional re-accreditation goals, regional re-accreditation goals, and federal standards and finally to reporting.

ASSESS is intended to allow faculty and administrators to capture each step of the assessment process. Those steps include the articulation of mission, outcomes, assessment methods, tools, results, decisions, and recommendations. They also include plans for delivery of program improvements, detailed results, and comprehensible summaries. Graphical displays of the aforementioned provide higher-level decision makers more understandable summaries of the preceding steps and their results. ASSESS pulls the information captured by the program and course providers into meaningful summaries, easily applicable to local, state, national, and international policy discussions on the quality of higher education.

This research project is designed to evaluate ASSESS' ability to do as it claims and to determine the extent that it

1) organizes data to contribute to meaningful improvements of student learning and development and

2) evaluate the quality of the comparability of the learning and development across programs within and across institutions.