Learning Outcomes

Student Affairs is committed to student engagement and learning. The primary areas in which we foster student growth are personal development, interpersonal skills, and social responsibility. Students’ personal development is a journey of reflection, wellness, and life-long learning. Interpersonal skills focus on interactions with others and learning to lead. Social responsibility focuses on student engagement with the campus, local, and global community while developing a sense of ethics, multicultural mindedness, and social justice.

Student Learning Outcomes Framework

Each of these competencies and their definitions are grounded in theory related to college student development as well as the national student development frameworks.

 Personal Development   Interpersonal Skills   Social Responsibility  
Critical Thinking Communication Ethics
Career Readiness Leadership Local and Global Engagement
Integrative Learning Teamwork & Collaboration Multicultural Mindedness
Realistic Self-Appraisal   Social Justice Advocacy
Well-being    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Measuring Student Learning in Student Affairs

To support staff members who facilitate learning and engagement opportunities, and to measure the extent to which students grow and learn after participating in such opportunities, the Student Affairs Assessment Team developed a rubric and question bank for each of the outcomes in the framework. This bank provides members of the Division with pre-established questions and rubric dimensions around each of the outcomes. Staff can use the bank to create their own surveys and rubrics. The bank is not designed to replace existing longitudinal work. Using the bank does have multiple benefits:

  • It cuts down on staff time by providing a resource of well designed, pre-written questions and rubric dimensions that staff can draw from in the survey/rubric design process.
  • Feedback from undergraduate and graduate students as well as staff were included in drafting the bank.
  • Using a common scale for questions and rubrics means we can easily pull data from the program level to tell a larger, comprehensive departmental and divisional story.

Using the Student Affairs Learning Outcome Rubric and Question Bank

  • Each of the question bank documents include a list of questions arranged by Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning. All questions in the bank can be answered using the same scale (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree).
  • Each rubric also has the same scale (beginner, developing, competent, and advanced). The Assessment Team frames “beginner” as someone who had not yet developed a given skill, “developing” as someone who is makes progress with support from other students and staff members. “Competent” is largely used to identify a student who is self-sufficient or needs little guidance in a skill area and “advanced”, to describe a student who uses their skills to teach or mentor other students.
  • You can use the banks by opening the links to one of the outcomes (listed below), reading through the items, picking the items that best align with your learning opportunity, and building your own survey in Baseline.
  • If you want to assess a program focused on a specific skill (e.g., critical thinking) you could just use the bank associated with that outcome as a stand-alone survey or rubric.
  • Each of the items and rubrics will also be uploaded into Baseline. Staff will be able to select all or part of the questions related to an outcome, and all or part of the rubric associated with a specific outcome. If you have a learning opportunity that helps students develop multiple outcomes, you can pull the relevant questions and rubric dimensions together to build what best meets your needs.

Click on the following documents to learn more about each outcome and access the bank: