Linking Program Level Assessment to Course Level Assessment Activities

Assessment, or better stated, the assurance of student learning, has become a central issue in both the internal and the external evaluations of degree programs offered by colleges and universities. The continual importance of assurance of learning activities within institutions of higher education has generated a growing need to create empirical assessment efforts that are both meaningful and relevant to whatever goals and objectives an institution of higher education plans to achieve. Most of the learning that the institutions seek to assure takes place in the context of individual courses. For that reason progress in making assessment measurements more impactful suggests an approach that links specific class assignments and activities to specifically desired learning outcomes. The present paper presents an Assessment Validation Model. The model points out the linkages between and among activities relevant to assessment. The paper also provides empirical data that both demonstrate the effectiveness of the AVM and focus on validating the relationships between university level assessment objectives and learning objectives designed to be achieved within an individual class.