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It is necessary for an educational establishment to monitor its students’ learning capabilities and objections, along with overall outcomes of what they’ve learned. Educational objectives are statements that describe the expected accomplishments of students during the first few years after graduation—usually 3-5 years. These objectives should be consistent with the mission and goals of the program and the institution. Educational objectives need to be assessed and evaluated periodically. This is generally done through alumni, employer, recruiter, and/or advisory board assessment. The objectives should be evaluated on a systematic basis to determine their continued relevance to the needs of constituents. These types of evaluations should be done every 3-5 years.

Learning outcomes are statements that describe what students are expected to know and/or be able to do by the time of graduation. If students have achieved these outcomes, it is anticipated that they will be able to achieve the educational objectives after graduation. Performance criteria are those statements which define the learning outcomes. These criteria are high-level indicators that represent the knowledge, skills, attitudes, or behavior students should be able to demonstrate by the time of graduation that indicate competence related to the outcome. Understanding the alignment between educational practices and strategies promotes efficient and effective assessment practices. This can be accomplished by mapping educational strategies (which could include co-curricular activities) to learning outcomes.

Strategies for data collection and analysis need to be developed that are consistent with the assessment question, resources available, appropriate validity and utility of findings. Evaluation is the process that is used to determine the meaning of the assessment results. This includes the implications of assessment results related to program effectiveness and recommendations for improvement. Evaluation should include those who can implement improvement strategies. The feedback process is critical to creating and maintaining a systematic quality assurance system. When successfully implemented, all elements of the quality assurance process interact with one another.

Whatever institution is doing the assessment should abide by a certain set of terms and specifications for evaluating their students. This is when a rubric will come into play for the evaluating and assessment process. A rubric is an assessment tool used to measure students’ work. It is a scoring guide that seeks to evaluate a student’s performance based on the sum of a full range of criteria rather than a single numerical score. A rubric is a working guide for students and teachers, usually handed out before the assignment begins in order to get students to think about the criteria on which their work will be judged. Rubrics can be analytic or holistic, and they can be created for any content area including math, science, history, writing, foreign languages, drama, art, music, etc. Rubrics help teachers to more fairly evaluate students’ learning outcomes.

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