Assessment

In its educational mission and strategic pillars, Rowan University declares its commitment to high-quality education for all students. The Office of Assessment helps put that commitment into action by providing the systems, standards, and processes that facilitate ongoing improvement to the University’s educational programs.

In practice, assessment takes various forms, many of which are informal. These informal assessments might be as simple as faculty reflecting on how their students performed during the semester and considering ways to improve their courses for future students. Or they could take the form of faculty discussing teaching and learning with each other or their students. There is great value in this type of assessment.

To compliment these informal practices, the Office of Assessment supports systematic learning outcomes assessment. In contrast to most informal assessments, systematic assessment works well at the scale of an entire general education or degree program and allows faculty to measure changes over extended periods of time.

The Office of Assessment helps faculty define and measure their programs’ learning outcomes so they can identify areas for improvement, implement changes to their curricula and pedagogy, and measure the success of those changes.

Through systematic assessment, faculty answer questions such as:

• What competencies are students struggling to demonstrate?
• What competencies need to be further developed in a prerequisite course so that students are more successful in subsequent courses?
• Which students are having difficulty completing the program and why?
• What grading practices correspond with students’ grades accurately reflecting their competencies?