FAQs | Office of the Provost

In the context of degree and certificate programs, “Academic Assessment” is an ongoing process to inform campus decisions to improve curriculum and instruction. The Office of Academic Assessment focuses on the assessment of student learning in academic degree and certificate programs.

See also Program Asssessment Overview.

Every institution in SUNY must conduct assessment continuously for two basic reasons.

1) Formal: We have to.
SUNY and the Middle States Commission on Higher Education requires campuses to continuously evaluate and improve academic programs. For more information, go to Selected Literature and Resources and select the links for Middle States and SUNY.

2) Organic: We want to.
All faculty want to know whether their students are learning, and all departments have reasons to change their curriculum, usually with the intent of improving it. Assessment is the process by which we gather feedback and inform decisions to improve curriculum and instruction.

Program assessment is dynamic. It relies on thoughtful dialog, evidence and analysis. A dialogue without evidence and analysis often leads to unresolvable differences and slow progress toward a goal. In its simplest form, assessment can inform intuition by maximizing equity and minimizing bias. "In the absence of evidence, analysis, and dialog, intuition devolves into prejudice." [1]

Minimizing bias is not only consistent with the University mission to celebrate diversity, but also important in our efforts to create an effective system of curriculum and instruction that is both equitable and accessible.The vision of the Office of Academic Assessment is to support faculty in their efforts to enhance the educational programs of the university; and to establish a meaningful, inclusive, thoughtful, and transparent process of continuous improvement in support of the University’s Mission. The program assessment process will align with that vision.

The SBU Assessment Model

The program assessment process at Stony Brook also aligns closely with the Model for Improvement, commonly known as the PDSA Improvement Model. It was developed by Associates in Process Improvement. The healthcare industry among others uses the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle for testing a change in the real work setting by planning it, trying it, observing the results, and acting on what is learned. It is the scientific method adapted for action-oriented learning. [2] [3]

PDSA Improvement Model

Setting Aims	The aim should be time-specific and measurable; it should also define the specific population of patients or other system that will be affected.
Establishing Measures	Teams use quantitative measures to determine if a specific change actually leads to an improvement.
Selecting Changes	Ideas for change may come from those who work in the system or from the experience of others who have successfully improved.
Testing Changes	The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is shorthand for testing a change in the real work setting — by planning it, trying it, observing the results, and acting on what is learned. This is the scientific method adapted for action-oriented learning.
Implementing Changes	After testing a change on a small scale, learning from each test, and refining the change through several PDSA cycles, the team may implement the change on a broader scale — for example, for an entire pilot population or on an entire unit.
Spreading Changes	After successful implementation of a change or package of changes for a pilot population or an entire unit, the team can spread the changes to other parts of the organization or in other organizations.

[1 ]--Adrian Perez-Melgosa, Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook , Through personal conversation, 2019, confirmed via correspondence April 2020.

[2] Langley GL, Moen R, Nolan KM, Nolan TW, Norman CL, Provost LP. The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance (2nd edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers; 2009.

Assessment is an integral part of delivering curriculum and instruction, for which the faculty are responsible. See Part 52.2 of the Standards for the Registration of Undergraduate and graduate Curricula. The assessment process is collaborative and includes faculty, students, and administrators at all levels. It is structured and “owned” in exactly the same way as curriculum and instruction.

All standalone degree and certificate programs conduct academic assessment on a continuous, ongoing basis. See “Program Assessment Plan” for more information.

The process described on this website was designed through shared governance by way of a SBU faculty committee. Beginning in Fall 2018, a group of faculty and administrators consulted the literature and studied examples from other institutions and came up with a process that we think will be best for Stony Brook. We will change the process as needed.

Just as curriculum is structured in academic departments, so is assessment. Since 2013, each department has designated a faculty member as an “assessment coordinator” for each degree or certificate program. Going forward, the assessment coordinator will be the leader for assessment in that program or department. See Assessment Coordinators for more information.

No. Self-studies and course evaluations are components of the overall assessment process Self-studies at Stony Brook have traditionally focused on the nuts and bolts of the department, including measurements of student enrollment, graduation rates, faculty productivity (books, articles, citations), and budget. Academic Assessment focuses on assessment of student learning at the degree and certificate program level.

Course evaluations at Stony Brook solicit feedback from students on the instruction they receive, but course evaluations only tell part of the story. Course evaluations are an important element of assessment, but are only one piece of evidence to consider in assessing an academic program.

Assessment is what you make of it. There are some skeptics and there are examples of assessment gone bad, and examples of institutions whose administrators focus too much or too little on assessment. At Stony Brook Office of Academic Assessment, our goal is to practice “practical assessment” and add value to curriculum and instruction by (a) leveraging what departments are doing already to improve education, and (b) integrating the assessment process into the curriculum proposal process.

The meaning of assessment is often defined by context, which sometimes leads to confusion.

The most common confusion involves a conflation of “evaluation” and “assessment.” In the context of academic program assessment, “evaluation” refers to assigning grades or making judgements, whereas “assessment” refers to the whole process, culminating in an action to improve.

“Assessment” is often conflated with other words, such as:

Observe
Measure
Evaluate
Research
Analyze, Synthesize
Intuit
Assess

To “assess” is to decide what action to take based on information gleaned from observation, measurement, evaluation, research, analysis, and intuition.

One can gain perspective on Academic Program Assessment by considering its use in farming and healthcare.

Farming: Farmers evaluate their yield each growing season and adjust processes and allocation of resources to maximize quality. Farmers react to circumstances beyond their control, such as weather, market demand, government regulations, development of new technology and research, and supply chains, to name a few. The quality of food in your supermarket is a result of continuous assessment processes aimed at optimizing quality with many other factors.

Healthcare: Healthcare professionals continuously assess the effectiveness of treatments and adjust delivery of care to maximize patient health. Assessment occurs at all levels of the industry, from collecting measurements from individual patients to large-scale analysis and actions. The quality of affordable healthcare is a result of careful assessment through observation, measurement, evaluation, research, analysis and intuition and action.

For the purposes of Assessment, the term academic “program” refers to a degree or certificate program. A “department” is a group of faculty who share a similar academic or research purpose. Stony Brook has approximately 285 academic programs, distributed among about 77 academic departments, centers, or institutes. There are some academic units called “program,” “center” or “institute” that offers academic programs (for example, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric; Institute for Advanced Computational Science), which for this purpose is considered a department. The degree and certificate program assessment project is focused on achieving the formal and organic goals of producing evidence of assessment for each of the 285 academic programs.

There are differences of opinion in the use of the terms “goals,” “outcomes,” and “objectives.” Through thoughtful discussion at Stony Brook in 2019-20, an assessment working group and the SBC Implementation Group has chosen to use “objectives” as the statement to mean what students *should* know or do at the end of a program or course. “Outcomes” are description of what students *did* based on the objectives. Therefore, objectives are prospective whereas “outcomes” are retrospective. People say “what *are” the objectives,” and “what *were* the outcomes.”

Giving final grades is not the same as assessment but is instead an aggregate of all the evaluative scores you have given a student over a period of time (semester). A final grade is an average of the instructor evaluation of a student’s performance on several learning activities throughout the semester. A goal of assessment is to reveal where in a course or program there might be room for improvement in instruction or curriculum. Yes, a grade can give a high-aggregate view of whether students are doing well (and therefore if a curriculum is working as designed), but they do not reveal the fine-grained information produced by careful assessment of learning objectives. In addition, responsible assessment includes not only direct measurements of the curriculum (i.e., faculty evaluating students) but also indirect measurements. If all you’re doing is giving final grades, you are not receiving enough objective information to make informed decisions about your curriculum or instruction.

Always! It’s an ongoing process, but (a) it doesn’t take that much work once you are doing it and (b) you’re probably already doing it in your own way. The time-intensive and thought-provoking activities are (a) coordination with your colleagues, (b) using assessment results to inform an action and (c) the documentation of what you’ve done.

For the formal reasons (Middle States), need to accumulate a body of documents as evidence of our process. In particular, the evidence must show how and when the “use of assessment results” inform departments’ decisions to update curriculum and instruction.

To foster a continuous process by which departments do a little every year (rather than waiting and doing a heavy lift every seven years), and to support the goal of accumulating a body of evidence for Middle States, the 2018 committee decided to collect the following documents or “deliverables” for each program.

An assessment plan, including clearly stated program learning objectives, a curriculum map, and a timeline with reasonable details for conducting assessment
A short annual report from each program to briefly describe the assessment activities and the actions taken during the preceding academic year.
A comprehensive report at least every seven years.

In addition, the institution must report to our accreditors based on their reporting schedule. For our regional accreditor, Middle States, this means writing an institutional self-study, supported by a body of evidence as described above.

Assessment is neither poetry nor perfection. The process of assessment does not attempt to quantify the twinkle in a favorite professor’s eye, the kindness of faculty in their mentorship of students, or the talent of gifted teachers. Education is much more than what assessment activities can capture, but assessment does serve as a reliable process to improve our educational effectiveness and enhance student success.