Program Assessment

What is Program Assessment? 

Program assessment refers to the process by which individual departments, programs, or centers study learning outcomes and learning progress within their specific curricula and pedagogies.

Faculty have the privilege and responsibility to determine learning goals for their students, what is taught in a program, and how.  Faculty also determine the tools and methods by which students’ learning is evaluated.

Unlike assessment of the general education, which the College studies learning impacts for all students, the domain of program assessment more narrowly is the academic programs (e.g., major or minor) housed within the program and the students enrolling in its courses (including service courses). 

Program assessment has other benefits beyond these annual reports to Trinity College leadership.  Sustaining a culture of evidence helps the program prepare for periodic self-studies and reviews.  Established measures, benchmarks, and needs assessment supplement grants and similar resource proposals.  Mature assessment projects can be translated into published papers in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). 

The primary goal of program assessment is to help academic programs optimize student learning consistent with the mission of their disciplines, but the university has a parallel duty to document these processes for our regional accreditor, SACSCOC.   SACSCOC expects Duke and other member institutions to communicate how their constituent departments and programs maintain regularized and rigorous assessment processes.  For more information on program assessment and accreditation, see Section 8.2.a. of the 2018 Principles of Accreditation.  

https://duke.is/SACSCOC-principles

 

Reviewed March 2024