Documenting and Improving Collegiate Learning in the USA

Abstract

This chapter examines the expansion and current features of learning outcomes assessment in the US higher education. It begins with an overview of the diverse and stratified higher education system, including the multiple layers of state and federal influence but lack of centralized tightly linked control mechanisms. It describes the changing context of, and increased interest in, learning outcomes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the roles of various external actors. In so doing it highlights the regional and national accrediting bodies that serve as gateways to federal financial aid funds and therefore serve as important means of affecting change. Although assessment is important for institutional accountability, its true value lies in its as-yet-unrealized potential to fundamentally improve the teaching and learning at the campus level. As such, the chapter concludes with considerations of on-campus actors at the heart of assessment processes and the evidence of changing practices that have been revealed through recent national surveys by research and voluntary membership groups.