Among institutions of higher education, a learning outcomes assessment (LOA) is — as it sounds — an assessment process focusing on student learning and outcomes.
The assessment process can help maintain the quality of the academic programs offered to students and can also reveal a range of insights about an academic program, including gaps or redundancies in the curriculum, curricular shifts, course sequencing issues, inappropriate performance expectations, misalignment between objectives and curriculum, positive or negative student outcomes, and more.
At Penn State, LOAs focus on determining the extent to which students are meeting expectations in undergraduate, graduate, and certificate programs across the institution. This process also provides faculty with an opportunity to collaboratively determine the knowledge and skills that graduates should be able to demonstrate and then collect evidence of the extent to which students are meeting those learning expectations.
Additionally, Middle States Commission on Higher Education — the University’s accrediting institution — requires its member institutions to demonstrate continual student learning assessment at the program level as part of each reaffirmation of accreditation process.