Overview of Outcomes Assessment in
Undergraduate Education at NC State University

In the last decade NC State has made great strides in undergraduate student learning outcomes assessment by taking advantage of decentralization and of faculty initiatives that cut across institutional boundaries.  A primary premise is that faculty and co-curricular experts know their programs best and have the professional and pedagogical expertise in their areas to obtain evidence that demonstrates their programs’ strengths and weaknesses and can be used to help plan improvements.

As a result, assessment processes vary from program to program and from purpose to purpose (e.g., assessing degree programs vs. assessing general education, assessment based in individual courses vs. projects or surveys that transcend courses).  However, a basic philosophy underlies every approach.   It is well-stated in a memo from the Committee on Undergraduate Program Review (CUPR) to the Institutional Effectiveness Compliance Committee for NC State’s SACS reaffirmation:

[CUPR is] a team of faculty (with some administrative support) that is working to dramatically improve undergraduate education at NC State University by making ourselves accountable through regular, continuous, and on-going assessment of our academic programs and the abilities of our students.  We are a team of faculty that is striving to make this transformation occur while being sensitive to accreditation needs of individual programs, tailoring it to be no more burdensome than what is necessary in order for the process to be effective, maintaining a commitment to making the process meaningful, and carefully respecting disciplinary autonomy.  The success of program assessment depends on faculty.  And it is because of CUPR’s faculty driven approach and the buy-in from colleagues across the campus that the process is working here at NC State University... (Jon Rust, Professor of Textile Engineering and former CUPR chair)

This implies a high level of faculty engagement in assessment. Meaningful reflection about a program’s functioning and evidence of sound critical judgment in program planning are part of faculty members’ and administrators’ charge as stewards of the institution and promoters of our institutional culture.  Assessment-based planning is an institutional value.  We illustrate that culture in the work we do for undergraduate academic program review and in revitalizing the university’s undergraduate general education requirements, both of which are described later in this document. Other illustrations include work done for program accreditations such as the College of Engineering’s preparation for ABET reviews and, most recently, and for NC State’s compact planning process that uses assessment-based evidence of impact and effectiveness to drive discussions about resources. This document includes many examples where faculty wholeheartedly embrace assessment as part of “what education is about” and vigorously engage in the process because they value what they learn about their students and their curriculum.

The collective impact of the developments outlined in this document is an advanced and well-established climate for outcomes assessment in undergraduate education that is a major part of NC State’s “bottom-up” approach to outcomes assessment. NC State elicits and nurtures outcomes assessment processes such as undergraduate academic program review that are developed and "owned" by individual academic and service departments and programs rather than organized and imposed from above.  In this kind of bottom-up approach, central administration's role is to provide an environment that supports unit-based assessment and to invite and use units' results for planning. We believe that the level of institutional support and the widespread and spreading unit-based assessment of student learning outcomes is a particularly strong demonstration of our success with our encourage-and-nurture approach, and that this bottom-up approach produces more lasting and effective assessment activities than a top-down approach does. The document “Undergraduate Assessment at North Carolina State University: A Collaborative Effort” on our web site for Undergraduate Academic Program Review (UAPR) includes an extended description of these developments, their philosophy, and their impact.

Systematic development of student learning outcomes assessment began at NC State in the late 1980’s with centrally-organized and managed assessment activities. The direction changed in the mid-1990’s as we learned from experience that this approach was not an effective way to develop a general climate of assessment rooted in individual faculty members’ activities. Key events in NC State’s development of the program-based bottom-up approach to assessment mentioned above include:

·      our 1989 Fifth-Year Report for SACS outlining how we would implement outcomes assessment on campus, and the related assessment planning for the 1994 SACS review;

·      key faculty members’ and administrators’ attendance at national assessment conferences sparked organized ad-hoc discussion of  assessment issues, a University IE Committee, and TQM/CQI discussions and initial planning

·      the formation of the Committee on Undergraduate Academic Program Development and Review Process Improvement (CUAPDRPI) which outlined and piloted an outcomes-based program review process and established the Committee on Undergraduate Program Review (CUPR) to refine and implement the process; the resulting Undergraduate Academic Program Review process, described later in this document, includes extensive training and support components and draws on the expertise and experience of those involved in already-existing assessment activities;

·      establishment of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program (CWSP) to help academic programs’ implement general education requirements;

·      assessment components in faculty-developed curriculum-renewal projects that are described later in this document, such as the inquiry-guided learning (IGL) initiatives;

·      regular campus-wide surveys of undergraduates’ opinions and self-reflections;

·      the College of Engineering’s (COE) intensive preparation for outcomes-based ABET accreditation review;

·      assessment directors hired by the Division of Undergraduate Affairs, the Office of University Planning & Analysis, and the College of Engineering, to assist faculty members and academic programs plan and implement outcomes assessment;

·      the use of assessment results in the university’s compact planning process and encouragement of planning initiatives that result from units’ monitoring their own effectiveness and efficiency; and

·      development of a more effective process to assess general education outcomes, described later in this document.

Undergraduate Academic Program Review (UAPR)  

Undergraduate Academic Program Review is a systematic and well- organized process, intended to promote meaningful and manageable assessment of academic programs and undergraduate affairs administrative programs. (The UAPR website has a wealth of information about the process and the evidence it produces. “How to Navigate This Website” and the UAPR website’s site map are useful starting points when exploring the site.)

Outcomes assessment activities are most effective when they are continuous and ongoing. To support assessment activities between periodic full program reviews, the Committee on Undergraduate Program Review (CUPR) requests regular progress reports and provides extensive feedback to help programs develop and maintain their assessment activities. CUPR members and facilitators use an evaluation rubric to guide their feedback, with training workshops and norming exercises to make the feedback more effective. This regular feedback is part of an explicit plan to monitor and assess the UAPR process.

CUPR and the Division of Undergraduate Affairs provide a variety of support to nurture NC State’s assessment culture.  Workshops are often customized for a particular college or set of departments.  Web-based resources include an extensive set of answers to frequently-asked questions, information on internal and external funding opportunities, and a Publishing Opportunities page. CUPR members, campus assessment experts, and other faculty and staff with assessment experience have become UAPR facilitators, available for one-on-one consultation and assistance to departments and programs.  The UAPR web site includes links to a wide range of resources at NC State and elsewhere, adapted from the nationally-known site of assessment links also maintained at NC State by University Planning & Analysis.

In keeping with NC State’s “bottom-up” approach to assessment, colleges, departments, and programs vary in their assessment processes and how they document what they have learned as a result. For example, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures’ process involves faculty at all levels. The department  has made the details of their process, assessment results, and use of their results  completely available on the Web.  Physics also has  most of their faculty involved and their process has been very reflective and thorough, but documentation continues to cause frustration.  At the college level, the College of Engineering has a very organized, sophisticated process for assessment and documentation of results and plans for program improvements .  The College of Design, while equally sophisticated and systematic in its assessment process, is less methodical in its documentation.  Some colleges and programs share their assessment processes and results publicly via the Web. Restricted files associated with the UGA Assessment Impact Report include all assessment plans, reports of assessment results and how results are used, and CUPR feedback on these plans and reports; access will be provided on request to the Compliance Certification Team and others involved in NC State’s compliance review for SACS reaffirmation.

·      The Campus Writing and Speaking Program has served to help faculty embed  communication as a means of measuring and documenting learning, as well as an end unto itself. As part of this activity, CWSP has been actively helping undergraduate departments develop explicit writing and speaking outcomes for their disciplines and methods to assess them.

·      Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has been infused in first-year seminars and is moving throughout the curriculum; its proponents and practitioners have adopted course-based assessment as the norm for this work.

·      Service learning has implemented both program and course-based assessment, as has the ALCOA curriculum diversity project.  Service Learning faculty members are currently refining a sophisticated assessment plan that will evaluate evidence of students’ ability to reflect and connect their service experience with their discipline, the hallmark of this program.

·       Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) is an impressive program in the physical sciences, which was developed at NC State and has been implemented at other institutions such as MIT, Alabama, and Central Florida.  The evidence for impact on student learning has been most encouraging to professors who must teach courses with large enrollment.

·      Project 25 and the College of Engineering’s mobile-computing pilot are faculty-driven experiments in computer-assisted instruction. Assessment includes evaluating the impact of web-based instruction with student and faculty surveys and with comparisons of web-based and non-web versions of some of the courses (Project 25) and compares various aspects of student performance in “laptop” courses and non-laptop versions of the same courses (COE).

·       Some of the programs mentioned above are services of the Division of Undergraduate Affairs (UGA). UGA offers other student-support programs such as Co-operative Education, the Honors Program, and the Virtual Advising Center. These programs’ outcomes assessment processes follow the general guidelines developed for Undergraduate Academic Program Review.

·       NC State University’s involvement in the Pew-funded Student Learning Initiative led at Alverno College also illustrates our continued commitment to improving undergraduate learning through assessment. We were one of two research universities among the 27 participating institutions. ^[1]  

Assessment of general education requirements

·      NC State University's current undergraduate General Education Requirements (GERs) were formalized in 1992 and implemented campus-wide in 1994.  Oversight and assessment of the GERs is the responsibility of the Council on Undergraduate Education (CUE), the university standing committee that advises on general education policy.  As in many other universities with "smorgasboard" GERs, general education assessment initially relied on results from campus-wide student surveys and on the more localized work of focused programs such as the Campus Writing & Speaking Program, assessment of critical thinking in a variety of Inquiry-Guided Learning projects, and program assessment processes in mathematically-oriented undergraduate programs.

·       Recognizing the need for assessment that allows faculty teaching GER courses to evaluate and improve those courses as GER courses-as well as to provide greater consistency across courses in the various GER subject categories-CUE has instituted course-based outcomes assessment.  This assessment involves collaboration between the CUE and the faculty teaching GER courses.

·       For each GER subject category, CUE has generated general objectives that all courses in that category should meet.  Faculty who teach GER courses create course-specific learning outcomes designed to help students reach the appropriate objectives, and identify specific means of evaluating those outcomes.  Results of these assessments are reported to the program and the university.  This assessment process has been institutionalized in formal university procedures such as the Course Action Form submitted when a new course is proposed and in requirements for syllabi of all GER courses.

·       The new process is being piloted in Spring and Fall 2003 with phased implementation beginning in Fall 2003 and full implementation beginning in Fall 2004.

·       The university also makes use of a variety of student surveys that include questions about students' GER experiences.  Second-term sophomores, graduating seniors, and baccalaureate alumni are surveyed regularly about their educational experience and its contributions to their knowledge, skills, and development.  Departments may request special survey inserts with the graduating-senior and baccalaureate-alumni surveys that ask additional specific to the student's college and major program.

·       Results from the campus-wide surveys are provided to colleges and academic departments to assist their assessment activities and campus-wide and college-level results are on a publicly available web site.  Many units use these results for program improvement as part of their own assessment processes.

Our evaluation of assessment in undergraduate education at NC State: Outcomes assessment in undergraduate education is extensive, well-organized, and supports bottom-up development and programs’ ownership, understanding, and acceptance of assessment activities. Degree-granting programs, curriculum-renewal and development projects, and educational-support programs all participate. As is appropriate in a bottom-up environment like this,  individual programs’ assessment processes are at various levels of development. Some are quite mature, a few are just beginning, most could be classified as “developing” or “advanced.” The overall environment for assessment is quite sophisticated and NC State’s UAPR development has become well-known and respected in the national assessment community.