Assessment of Learning Outcomes and Competencies

Short answer

• Assessment of learning outcomes is the systematic process of gathering evidence about what students know and can do as a result of their education, then using that evidence to improve teaching and programs. It asks whether students are actually learning what a course or degree promises, not only whether they passed.
• A learning outcome is a clear statement of what a student should know, do, or value by the end of a course or program. A competency is a broader combination of knowledge, skills, and judgment that a person can apply in real settings, such as clinical work, teaching, or engineering practice. Outcomes describe the destination. Competencies describe the applied ability a graduate carries into work and life.
• Assessment is not the same as grading. A grade summarizes one student's performance in one course. Outcomes assessment looks across many students and many pieces of work to judge whether a whole program is delivering what it claims.
• In higher education, the work follows a repeating cycle: state the outcomes, design ways to measure them, collect student work, judge it against clear criteria, and act on what the evidence shows. Accreditors require this cycle, and the best programs use it to change curricula, assignments, and support for students.
• The most trusted evidence comes from direct measures, which examine actual student work such as exams, projects, portfolios, and performances, judged with shared rubrics. Surveys and interviews are indirect measures. They add useful context, but they cannot prove learning on their own.

What Assessment of Learning Outcomes Means

Assessment of learning outcomes is a deliberate, organized effort to find out what students have learned and then to use that knowledge to make learning better. The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, known as NILOA, was established in 2008 to help institutions discover and adopt promising practices in this work. Its stated objective is to find ways that academic programs can use assessment data inside the institution to strengthen undergraduate education, and outside it to communicate with policymakers, families, and other stakeholders.

That definition points to two halves of the work, and both matter. The first half is evidence: collecting student work and other information that shows what students can do. The second half is use: studying that evidence and changing something because of it. A program that collects data and files it away has measured learning, but it has not finished the job. The point of assessment is improvement, and accreditors judge programs on whether they close that gap.

It helps to separate three words that are often used as if they meant the same thing. Teaching is what instructors do. Learning is what happens in students. Assessment is the evidence gathering that connects the two: it shows whether the teaching produced the learning that was intended. When the evidence shows a gap, the program changes the teaching, the curriculum, or the support around students, and then measures again.

Assessment also operates at several levels, and the level changes what the evidence can show. At the course level, an instructor checks whether students in one class met that class’s outcomes. At the program level, faculty look across a whole major or degree to see whether graduates leave with the knowledge and skills the program promises. At the institution level, a college checks broad goals, such as critical thinking or written communication, across all of its programs. A single exam can serve the course level well and still tell a program almost nothing about its graduates, which is why good assessment plans work at more than one level.

One common confusion is worth clearing up early. Assessment of learning outcomes is not a test that students take once, and it is not a ranking of colleges. It is an ongoing practice inside an institution, carried out mostly by faculty, that produces evidence about learning over time. Readers who encounter an assessment report are looking at one institution’s honest account of its own strengths and weaknesses, not at a league table.

Learning Outcomes and Competencies: What Is Different

A learning outcome is a statement of what a student should know or be able to do when a defined piece of learning is complete. Ohio University’s assessment guidance, which follows the NILOA Transparency Framework, puts it plainly: program learning outcomes describe what a student should know or be able to do upon completion of the program. Good outcomes are written from the student’s point of view, use observable action verbs such as analyze, design, or evaluate, and describe something that can actually be seen in student work. “Students will understand biology” is a weak outcome, because understanding cannot be observed directly. “Students will explain how natural selection produces adaptation, using evidence from a case study” is a strong outcome, because a reader can judge from a student’s answer whether it was met.

A competency is related but broader. It is a combination of knowledge, skill, and judgment that a person can apply in a real setting, often to a professional standard. A nursing student may meet a course outcome by passing a pharmacology exam, but the competency is the ability to administer medication safely to a real patient, under time pressure, while communicating clearly with the care team. The outcome is a building block. The competency is the assembled ability, demonstrated in practice.

The distinction matters most in fields where graduates must be ready to practice. In teacher preparation, engineering, nursing, and other professional programs, accreditors and licensing bodies define competencies that graduates must demonstrate, and the program’s outcomes are written to build toward them. In general education, the language of outcomes is more common: a college states what every graduate should be able to do, such as write clearly, reason quantitatively, or evaluate sources, and then measures those abilities across the curriculum.

Outcomes and competencies also differ in how they are judged. An outcome can often be judged from a single assignment, such as an essay or a lab report. A competency usually needs several kinds of evidence gathered over time: coursework, supervised practice, a portfolio, and sometimes an external examination. That is one reason competency based programs, such as many apprenticeships, spread assessment across the whole program rather than concentrating it in final exams. Readers interested in how work based learning is structured can see our explainer on what an apprenticeship is.

There is no single official list of outcomes or competencies that all colleges must use. Institutions write their own, within frameworks set by accreditors and by the expectations of their fields. That freedom is intentional: a program in graphic design and a program in accounting serve different purposes, and their outcomes should reflect that. The discipline comes from making the outcomes public, measuring them honestly, and acting on the results.

The Assessment Cycle, Step by Step

Assessment works as a cycle, not as a one time project. The steps are similar wherever the work is done well, and they repeat: each round of evidence leads to changes, and the changes are then measured again. Adelphi University’s assessment glossary describes the cycle as a continuous process that starts with the statement of program mission, goals, and objectives, continues with the identification and collection of appropriate measures, is followed by evaluation of performance, uses the outcomes to improve the program, and then begins again.

The Emerson College assessment guide breaks the cycle into six practical steps, adapted from a NILOA occasional paper by Gilchrist and Oakleaf published in 2012. The steps below follow that widely used structure.

Step 1: Set learning objectives. Everything starts with deciding what students should learn. Faculty agree on a small number of outcomes for the program, usually five to eight, that capture what matters most. Fewer, clearer outcomes beat a long list that nobody can measure well. Each outcome should be measurable, which is the same discipline behind writing a good goal in any field. Our guide to what a SMART goal is explains the criteria that make a goal specific, measurable, and time bound, and those criteria apply directly to writing outcomes.

Step 2: Define criteria for success. Before collecting any student work, faculty decide what good performance looks like. This usually means writing or adopting a rubric, a scoring guide that describes levels of performance from beginning to accomplished. It also means setting a target, such as the share of students expected to reach the accomplished level. Setting the target in advance matters, because it stops a program from moving the goalposts after seeing the results.

Step 3: Take action. Faculty design or select assignments that will produce the evidence they need. This is the principle of alignment: the assignment must actually ask students to do what the outcome describes. An outcome about oral communication cannot be measured with a multiple choice test. It needs a presentation, a debate, or a recorded explanation.

Step 4: Gather evidence. Student work is collected according to the plan. Good plans sample work rather than scoring everything: a program might collect the final paper from every student in a capstone course, or a random sample of portfolios from a graduating class. Sampling keeps the workload manageable while still giving a fair picture, provided the sample is chosen without bias toward the strongest students.

Step 5: Analyze the evidence. Faculty score the collected work, usually with the rubric from step 2, and look for patterns. The question is not “what was the average score” but “where do students consistently succeed, and where do they consistently struggle?” A useful analysis also breaks results down by student group, because an outcome that looks fine on average can hide a real gap for one group of students.

Step 6: Make changes, then measure again. This is the step that separates genuine assessment from data collection. Faculty agree on specific changes, such as revising an assignment, adding a practice exercise, changing the order of topics, or offering extra support, and they record those decisions. The next cycle then checks whether the changes worked. Emerson’s guide notes that the length of a cycle varies: a course level cycle can be short, while a program level cycle may take much longer, because a department evaluates each objective in turn over several years.

Two habits make the cycle work in practice. The first is faculty ownership. Assessment done to satisfy an external requirement, with faculty treated as data providers, rarely changes anything. Assessment led by the faculty who teach the courses is far more likely to produce changes they believe in. The second habit is documentation. A program that writes down its outcomes, its plan, its results, and its decisions builds a record that survives staff turnover and gives the next review something real to work from.

Direct and Indirect Measures

Not all evidence about learning is equally strong, and the distinction between direct and indirect measures is one of the most important ideas in the field. A direct measure examines actual student work and judges it against stated criteria. An indirect measure asks about learning secondhand, through opinions, perceptions, or related records.

Direct measures include exams designed to test an outcome, essays and research papers, laboratory reports, performances and presentations, portfolios of work collected over time, capstone projects, and licensure or certification examinations where those exist. The common thread is that a reader can look at the work itself and judge what the student can do. A capstone thesis, for example, is a strong direct measure of research and writing ability, because the document itself shows the student’s thinking. Readers who want to understand what a thesis involves can see our explainer on what a thesis statement is.

Indirect measures include student surveys, alumni surveys, employer surveys, exit interviews, focus groups, and records such as course grades, retention rates, and job placement figures. These are useful: a survey can reveal that students felt unprepared in a particular area, and an employer survey can show which skills graduates use most. But they measure perceptions and proxies, not learning itself. Students can feel confident about a skill they have not mastered, and a high course grade can reflect effort, participation, and extra credit as much as mastery of an outcome.

For that reason, accreditation standards require direct measures, and most expect more than one kind. The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, known as ACEJMC, states in its guide to assessment of learning outcomes that an assessment plan should use multiple direct and indirect measures, and it suggests at least two direct measures and at least two indirect measures. That combination is good practice well beyond journalism: two different direct measures that point the same way give a finding real weight, and indirect measures then help explain why the pattern looks the way it does.

Course grades deserve a special note, because they are the measure most often mistaken for outcomes evidence. A grade in a course combines many things: exam scores, homework, participation, attendance, and sometimes extra credit. Two instructors teaching the same course can award different grades for the same level of learning, because their grading schemes differ. A grade therefore says something about a student’s performance in one course, but it is a weak measure of whether a program’s outcomes were met. Programs that rely on grades alone are measuring something real, but it is not the thing they claim to be measuring.

Rubrics and Authentic Student Work

If direct measures are the evidence, rubrics are the instrument that makes the evidence trustworthy. A rubric is a scoring guide that names the criteria for an outcome and describes what performance looks like at each level, from beginning to accomplished. When several faculty members score the same set of papers with the same rubric, their scores should mostly agree. When they do not agree, the rubric or the scoring process needs work, and that disagreement is itself useful information.

The best known set of rubrics in United States higher education is the VALUE set, developed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, known as AAC&U. VALUE stands for Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education. The rubrics are faculty developed frameworks that clarify expectations for essential learning outcomes and make it possible to evaluate authentic student work, such as research papers, projects, presentations, and portfolios, rather than relying on standardized tests. There are 16 VALUE rubrics, covering outcomes such as critical thinking, written communication, oral communication, quantitative literacy, information literacy, teamwork, problem solving, ethical reasoning, and integrative learning. The first rubrics were released in 2009, and the global learning rubric was added in 2013. AAC&U reports that the rubrics have been downloaded more than 875,000 times, are used by more than 3,000 colleges and universities, and are used by educators in more than 160 countries.

Authentic assessment is the idea behind the VALUE approach: judge students on work that resembles what they will actually do, rather than on artificial test items. A student who writes a research essay, designs a solution to a real problem, or presents findings to an audience is demonstrating the outcome in a form close to its real use. That is why portfolios and capstone projects feature so heavily in program assessment. They show sustained work over time, not a single performance on a single day. Project based learning produces exactly this kind of evidence, and our explainer on project based inquiry science shows how extended projects are structured in science classrooms.

Rubrics also change teaching, not only measurement. When students see a rubric before they start an assignment, they can see what good work looks like and aim for it. When faculty discuss rubric scores together, they often discover that they disagree about what counts as good writing or good reasoning, and that conversation can align a whole department’s expectations. A rubric used only after the fact, and never shared with students, wastes half of its value.

One caution applies to any rubric, including VALUE. A rubric written for one context should be adapted with care before it is used in another, and changes to a rubric can affect how reliable its scores are. AAC&U presents the VALUE rubrics as open educational resources that educators are free to adapt, but adaptation should be deliberate, with faculty agreeing on the adapted wording together rather than one person editing a rubric alone.

How Assessment Improves a Program: Closing the Loop

The phrase used across higher education for acting on assessment evidence is “closing the loop.” It means the cycle described above has completed its full turn: evidence was gathered, it was studied, a change was made, and the change was checked. The ACEJMC guide states the expectation directly, saying that a unit should annually close the loop to make tangible improvements to curriculum and instruction. A program that gathers evidence every year but never changes anything has an open loop, and accreditors treat that as a serious weakness.

Closing the loop produces changes of many sizes. Small changes are the most common: rewording an assignment so students understand what is asked, adding a practice exercise before a difficult task, or giving feedback earlier in a term. Medium changes include reordering topics in a sequence of courses, replacing a textbook, or adding a tutoring service. Large changes include redesigning a whole curriculum, adding a required course, or changing the structure of a degree. All of them count, provided they follow from the evidence and their effect is checked later.

A real example makes the pattern concrete. Suppose a business program finds, from scored capstone projects, that students write clear executive summaries but struggle to support recommendations with data. The faculty might add a data analysis exercise in an earlier course, revise the capstone instructions to require a data appendix, and offer a workshop on presenting numbers. Two years later, the next round of capstone scoring shows whether the weakness has shrunk. If it has, the change stays. If it has not, the faculty try something else. That is the loop, working as intended.

There is also an honest version of closing the loop that is easy to miss: sometimes the evidence shows the outcome itself is wrong. A program may discover that its stated outcomes are too vague to measure, too numerous to track, or no longer matched to what the field needs. Revising the outcomes is then the right response, and it is not a failure. It is the assessment process doing its job.

Programs also use assessment evidence for decisions beyond the curriculum. Results can support a request for new equipment, justify a new faculty position, or show a funding body that a program is delivering what it promises. But the primary audience is always internal: the faculty and staff who can change the program. Evidence written only for an external audience, in language no teacher would use, rarely leads to real change.

Learning Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education

Learning outcomes assessment is woven into higher education in the United States largely because accreditors require it. Institutional accreditors, the regional and national bodies that accredit whole colleges and universities, make assessment of student learning a condition of accreditation. Programmatic accreditors, which accredit individual programs such as journalism, nursing, or engineering, add their own requirements on top.

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, known as MSCHE, states the requirement under Standard 3, Design, Delivery, and Assessment of the Student Learning Experience, in its Fifteenth Edition, effective July 1, 2026. Criterion 3.5, Assessment of Student Learning, calls for evidence of the regular evaluation and systematic assessment of student learning outcomes, and course, institutional, and program-level educational effectiveness and use of assessment data to improve curricula and teaching. Under the earlier Fourteenth Edition, the same expectation appeared as Standard V, Educational Effectiveness Assessment, which stated that assessment of student learning and achievement must demonstrate that the institution’s students have accomplished educational goals consistent with their program of study, degree level, the institution’s mission, and appropriate expectations for institutions of higher education. That standard called for clearly stated educational goals, organized and systematic assessments conducted by faculty or appropriate professionals, and consideration and use of assessment results for the improvement of educational effectiveness. The underlying expectation is unchanged: state the goals, measure them, and use the results.

The Higher Learning Commission, known as HLC, carries the same requirement under Criterion 3, Teaching and Learning for Student Success. Its core component 3.E, Assessment of Student Learning, states that the institution improves the quality of educational programs based on its assessment of student learning. The revised criteria were adopted by HLC’s Board of Trustees on June 27, 2024, and took effect on September 1, 2025, consolidating the former Criteria 3 and 4 into the single Criterion 3. In the revised criteria, 4.B now means Resource Base and Sustainability, under Criterion 4, Sustainability. Under the superseded 2020 criteria, the same requirement appeared as Criterion 4, Teaching and Learning: Evaluation and Improvement, core component 4.B, which stated that the institution engages in ongoing assessment of student learning as part of its commitment to the educational outcomes of its students, has effective processes for assessment and for achievement of learning goals, uses the information gained from assessment to improve student learning, and uses processes and methods that reflect good practice, including the substantial participation of faculty. Those 2020 criteria were adopted on February 28, 2019, and took effect on September 1, 2020.

Programmatic accreditation adds subject specific detail. The ACEJMC example shows the pattern: its Standard 3, Assessment of Learning Outcomes, requires a written assessment plan built around the values and competencies of the field, multiple direct and indirect measures, and annual closing of the loop. Other professional accreditors work the same way, translating the general idea of outcomes assessment into the competencies their graduates must demonstrate.

Assessment also reaches general education, the part of a degree that all students share regardless of major. Colleges assess broad outcomes such as written communication, quantitative reasoning, and critical thinking across many courses, often using shared rubrics such as VALUE. This is where the difference between a college and a university can matter for how assessment is organized, because larger institutions may run general education assessment centrally while smaller colleges run it through individual departments. Our explainer on the difference between college and university sets out how the two kinds of institution differ in structure and mission.

Technology supports the work without replacing its judgment. A learning management system can collect student work, host e-portfolios, and record rubric scores, which makes sampling and analysis far easier than paper files ever did. Our explainer on what a learning management system is describes how these platforms organize courses, assignments, and grades. But no platform can decide what good work looks like. That judgment still belongs to faculty, and a system that scores work automatically is measuring something different from what a rubric based review measures.

Two Frameworks That Shape the Work

Two widely used frameworks help institutions organize their assessment work and talk about it in a shared language. Neither is a rulebook that colleges must follow, and neither replaces an accreditor’s standards. They are tools for making the work visible and comparable.

The first is NILOA’s Transparency Framework, published in 2011. It was designed to help institutions share their assessment processes and evidence with the public, after NILOA found a gap between how much assessment activity campus leaders said they were doing and how much was visible to anyone outside the institution. The framework has six components: student learning outcomes statements, assessment plans, assessment resources, current assessment activities, evidence of student learning, and use of student learning evidence. An institution that publishes all six gives a reader a complete picture: what it promises students will learn, how it plans to check, what help it provides, what it is doing now, what the evidence shows, and what it changed as a result. Many universities organize their assessment web pages around exactly these six headings, which makes it possible to compare institutions on the same terms.

The second is the Degree Qualifications Profile, known as the DQP, released by the Lumina Foundation in 2011. The DQP sets out what students should know and be able to do at each degree level: associate, bachelor, and master. It describes expectations across five areas of learning: specialized knowledge, broad and integrative knowledge, intellectual skills, applied learning, and civic learning. For each area it describes progressively more demanding performance at each degree level, so a bachelor degree expects more than an associate degree, and a master degree expects more still. The DQP was tested at more than 400 colleges and universities, and it remains a useful reference for programs that want to check whether their outcomes match the level of the degree they award. Readers considering a two year degree can see what that level typically involves in our explainer on the Associate of Applied Science degree.

Together, the two frameworks answer different questions. The Transparency Framework asks: can the public see what you do? The DQP asks: does what you expect match the degree you award? A program can use either without the other, but the strongest assessment cultures use both, publishing their outcomes and evidence openly and checking their expectations against a shared idea of what each degree level means.

Common Mistakes and Honest Limits

Assessment is a practical discipline, and it has familiar failure modes. Knowing them helps a reader judge whether a program’s assessment work is serious or decorative.

The first mistake is measuring what is easy instead of what matters. A multiple choice test is easy to score, so programs sometimes measure recall when their outcome promises analysis or judgment. The result looks precise and means little. Good assessment accepts the harder work of scoring real student products, even though it takes longer.

The second mistake is collecting evidence and never using it. Reports pile up, committees meet, and nothing changes. This is the open loop described above, and it is the most common reason accreditors cite programs. A program that can point to three changes it made because of assessment evidence is in a stronger position than a program with three hundred pages of unused data.

The third mistake is treating a single number as the whole story. An average rubric score, a pass rate, or a survey percentage can hide as much as it reveals. Useful analysis looks at patterns, breaks results down by group, and reads actual student work to understand why the numbers look the way they do. Numbers start the conversation. They do not end it.

The fourth mistake is confusing assessment with accountability alone. When assessment is used only to judge faculty or to satisfy an external demand, faculty have every reason to produce flattering results. When it is used to improve learning, faculty have a reason to find real weaknesses, because finding them is how teaching gets better. The culture around assessment matters as much as the method.

There are also honest limits to what assessment can prove. A rubric score is a judgment, and different judges can disagree. A sample of student work may not represent the whole program. A change in results from one year to the next may reflect a different group of students rather than a better curriculum. And some of the most valuable outcomes of education, such as curiosity, integrity, or civic commitment, are difficult to measure at all. Good assessment reports say these things plainly instead of pretending to a precision they do not have.

Finally, assessment is not a substitute for good teaching, and it cannot fix a program whose problems are structural. If a program has too few faculty, outdated equipment, or students who cannot afford to study full time, no amount of measurement will solve those problems. Assessment can reveal them and support the case for fixing them, but the fixing is a separate job.

What to Look for as a Student, Parent, or Employer

Assessment evidence is increasingly public, and a reader who knows what to look for can learn a great deal about a college or program before choosing it.

Start with the program’s published learning outcomes. They should be easy to find, written in plain language, and specific enough that a reader can picture what a graduate can do. Vague promises such as “students will become leaders” say little. Specific outcomes such as “graduates will design, conduct, and report an original research study” say a great deal. If a program does not publish its outcomes at all, that is itself informative.

Next, look for evidence and for what was done with it. A serious program publishes assessment results and describes changes it made because of them. Look for sentences that name a weakness, name a change, and name the result. A page that lists only strengths, with no weakness and no change, is probably a brochure rather than an assessment report.

Ask about direct measures. Does the program judge real student work, such as projects, portfolios, or performances, with shared criteria? Or does it rely on surveys and grades? Both kinds of evidence have a place, but a program with no direct measures has not shown what its students can actually do.

For employers, the most useful question is different: what does the program’s evidence say about the specific abilities you need? A nursing employer wants to know about clinical competence, not about a college’s general education scores. A technology employer wants evidence about problem solving and teamwork. Program level assessment reports, rather than institution wide summaries, are where that detail lives.

Students can also use assessment for their own learning. A rubric shared before an assignment is a map of what good work looks like. A portfolio that collects work across a degree is a record a graduate can show to an employer. And a program that explains its outcomes clearly helps a student choose courses with purpose, rather than simply accumulating credits. Clear writing is part of that: a student who can state an argument in a single sentence has a skill that transfers to every assignment. Our guide to how to write an essay covers that skill in detail.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between assessment and evaluation?

Assessment gathers evidence about student learning for the purpose of improving it. Evaluation makes a judgment about value or quality, such as whether a program should continue or a student should graduate. The two overlap: assessment evidence often feeds into evaluation decisions. But assessment is the evidence gathering part, and it is most useful when it is separated from high stakes judgment, so that faculty feel free to report real weaknesses.

Are learning outcomes the same as course objectives?

They are closely related, and some institutions use the terms interchangeably, but there is a useful distinction. Objectives usually describe what an instructor intends to cover or what a course will do. Outcomes describe what a student will know or be able to do as a result. “The course covers the causes of the Civil War” is an objective. “Students will explain the economic and political causes of the Civil War, using primary sources” is an outcome. Outcomes are written from the student’s side, and they can be observed in student work.

How is learning outcomes assessment different from grading?

Grading summarizes one student’s performance in one course, combining exams, homework, participation, and other factors into a single mark. Outcomes assessment looks across many students and many pieces of work to judge whether a program is delivering what it promises. A student can earn an A in a course while a program still finds, across all its students, that a particular outcome is weak. Grades answer a question about a student. Assessment answers a question about a program.

What is a competency based program?

A competency based program organizes learning around demonstrated abilities rather than time spent in class. Students progress when they can show they have mastered a competency, which may take more or less time than a traditional semester. Assessment in such programs is continuous and direct: portfolios, performances, and supervised practice provide the evidence, and the standard is whether the student can do the work to the required level, not how many hours they sat in a classroom.

Who does assessment in a college?

Faculty do most of it, because they design the assignments, score the work, and decide what to change. Assessment offices and institutional research staff support the work by designing plans, managing data, and helping with analysis. Administrators use the results for planning and for reporting to accreditors. Students contribute their work and, through surveys and interviews, their perspective on the learning experience. The work fails when any one group tries to do it alone.

Can assessment results be trusted?

They can be trusted to the extent that the methods are sound and the reporting is honest. Look for direct measures of real student work, scoring by more than one reader with a shared rubric, samples that represent the whole program, and reports that name weaknesses as well as strengths. Be cautious of results based only on surveys or grades, results from a tiny or unrepresentative sample, and reports that claim success on every outcome. No single assessment result proves very much on its own. A pattern across several measures, over several years, is far more convincing.

Sources & references

• Association of American Colleges and Universities. VALUE Rubrics. aacu.org/value/rubrics. Accessed November 12, 2026. Faculty developed rubrics for 16 essential learning outcomes; use of authentic student work; reported download, institution, and country figures.
• National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. Transparency Framework. 2011. Described at Temple University, ira.temple.edu/assessment; Appalachian State University, irap.appstate.edu; and California State University, Monterey Bay, csumb.edu. Six components: student learning outcomes statements, assessment plans, assessment resources, current assessment activities, evidence of student learning, use of student learning evidence.
• National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. Background and mission. Averett University assessment resources, averett.edu; NILOA established 2008.
• Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Standards for Accreditation and Requirements of Affiliation. msche.org/standards. Fifteenth Edition effective July 1, 2026. Standard 3, Design, Delivery, and Assessment of the Student Learning Experience, criterion 3.5, Assessment of Student Learning. The quoted Standard V wording is from the Fourteenth Edition, reproduced by member institutions.
• Higher Learning Commission. Criteria for Accreditation, Criterion 3, Teaching and Learning for Student Success. Revised criteria adopted June 27, 2024; effective September 1, 2025. Core component 3.E, Assessment of Student Learning. The quoted 4.B wording is from the superseded 2020 criteria, Criterion 4, Teaching and Learning: Evaluation and Improvement, adopted February 28, 2019; effective September 1, 2020, reproduced at the University of Toledo, utoledo.edu, and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, uwosh.edu.
• Lumina Foundation. The Degree Qualifications Profile. 2011. Five areas of learning across associate, bachelor, and master degree levels; testing at more than 400 colleges and universities. Described by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, heri.ucla.edu, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
• Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Guide to Assessment of Learning Outcomes for ACEJMC Accreditation. Updated fall 2026. Standard 3, multiple direct and indirect measures, at least two of each, and annual closing of the loop.
• Emerson College, Office of Academic Assessment. The Assessment Cycle. guides.library.emerson.edu. Six step cycle adapted from Gilchrist and Oakleaf, NILOA Occasional Paper 14, 2012.
• Adelphi University. Common Terminology, Annual Program Assessment. adelphi.edu. Definitions of assessment and the assessment cycle.
• Ohio University. Program Learning Outcomes Process and Procedures. ohio.edu. Program learning outcomes definition and the four reporting components under the NILOA Transparency Framework.
• MiraCosta College. Outcomes Assessment Handbook. miracosta.edu. Six step assessment cycle and student learning outcome definition.