National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA)

Indiana University and University of Illinois

Carnegie Corporation of New York, Lumina Foundation for Education, and The Teagle Foundation

Stanley Ikenberry, Co-principal Investigator, University of Illinois; George Kuh, Co-principal Investigator, Indiana University; Peter Ewell, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems; Jillian Kinzie, Associate Research Scientist, Indiana University; Staci Provezis, Project Manager, University of Illinois

NILOA serves to assist institutions and others in discovering and adopting promising practices for assessing college student learning outcomes. Given this mission, its primary objective is to identify and disseminate ways that academic programs and institutions can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families, and other stakeholders.

NILOA is engaged in the following activities:

• Conducting periodic web-based surveys of campus assessment efforts and interviewing key respondents.
  
• Analyzing institutional web sites and those of organizations engaged in assessment-related efforts.
  
• Producing a series of commissioned papers addressing pressing topics.
  
• Developing short, instructive case studies of promising practices in collegiate learning assessment—particularly the use of assessment data to improve student learning and approaches to public reporting of assessment data.
  
• Updating its web site so that it can serve as a go-to resource on learning outcomes assessment.

NILOA conducted its first survey of institutions' assessment practices in spring 2009. Results were released in fall 2009. NILOA also has a toolkit on its website with links to nationally available tests and surveys, as well as information on portfolio assessment. Also available from the website are papers about critical issues in assessment by such experts as Peter Ewell, Trudy Banta, Jane Wellman, and others. NILOA and the Council for Regional Accreditation Commissions (C-RAC) met last fall to discuss how the accreditation process can support and further institutional effort to assess learning outcomes and use the results to improve teaching and learning.

In addition to releasing the results of the web scans, NILOA is collaborating with the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) to update the 2001 ACE/AIR publication Measuring Quality: Choosing Among Surveys and Other Assessments of College Quality. This report will be released in spring 2010. Several additional occasional papers will be released later this year authored by Pat Hutchings, Randy Swing, Edwin Welch and others.

www.learningoutcomesassessment.org

03/30/2010