Assessment FAQs
Your College Assessment Lead will contact you before or after the semester begins to inform you that your course aligns with the learning outcomes being assessed for the year.
Go to the home page of the Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review (OAAPR). There is a listing of College Assessment Leads by College on the OAAPR website Office of Academic Assessment & Program Review | California State University, Northridge (csun.edu)
About 30 minutes. The time will vary depending on how many ISLOs you select and align to your course assignment. However, assessing while you are grading takes seconds when you know what you are assessing.
Faculty are invited to participate twice over five years to ensure you close the loop. We hope assessing student assignments will become as natural as teaching and grading.
No. You should assess an already existing assignment. It is not necessary to create an assignment for the purpose of assessment. This would defeat aligning the learning outcomes with existing course material.
Great. The PSLO and ISLO simplified rubric that you import easily attaches to your preexisting rubric. While selecting the preferences on your preexisting rubric, you will select a preference using the assessment criteria.
Not unless you want it to. When you import the ISLO to your Canvas shell, you can add the ISLO rubric score to your course or not.
Yes. The Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review (OAAPR) provides short training sessions, videos, and guides on importing the ISLO to your Canvas shell.
The Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review exports ILO data and disaggregates it to extend assessment analytics. Then, the data is transferred to our public-facing assessment dashboards.
You can grade outside Canvas and enter the assessment-related data into Canvas as you grade. OAAPR will help you create a shadow assignment to ensure the outcome data is collected.
No. The purpose of assessment is for continuous improvement. Assessment will never be used to evaluate your teaching. Assessment is a tool you can use to help your students succeed in achieving the outcomes at the course, program, and university levels.
You can assess anything you use to grade student performance if it aligns with the learning outcomes (i.e., quizzes, exams, essays, discussions, projects, presentations, art, showcases, films, performances, etc.).
Yes. We encourage it. Giving students multiple opportunities to achieve learning outcomes is ideal in the assessment world.
Nothing happens to you or the student. Assessment is about continuous improvement. Your course is just a snapshot of the whole picture. Assessment at the institutional level means students may be enrolled in multiple courses where they have other opportunities to achieve institutional learning outcomes.
We hope the outcomes data collected and analyzed will provide enough information to shift your pedagogy, inform the department curriculum and the assessment process, or help justify program resources.
No. Faculty design and administer assessments daily through assignments. Assessment is already integrated with teaching. The difference is that after you have reviewed the assignment, observed a presentation or performance, and scored an exam, you are now assessing the same assignment for outcome achievement. For faculty who take assessment seriously, there is very little time involved.
Great question. For students, the assessment of student artifacts answers one simple question—did the student learn what they were supposed to for graduation and post-graduation success?
For faculty, assessment data provides diagnostic information about gaps, strengths, and weaknesses in student learning that can be used to target instruction accordingly.