A New Verification Process for Assessing Intended Learning Outcomes

Continuance and accurate quality assessment of any academic program is the primary indicator of its progress and success. Quality assessment processes are mainly conducted to improve students' learning outcomes. Successful quality assessment processes should demonstrate clearly how an educational program had achieved its intended learning objectives. To validate the accomplishment of these intended objectives by a course instructor, students' assessments are usually used to demonstrate that the instructor had covered all relevant contents and material within his lectures. The main drawback of this approach is that it cannot prove that students had really attained the required knowledge and skills for each intended learning objective. In this paper we are proposing a general model and a tool that supports the evaluation of each intended learning objective within a course based on the actual students' performance on that objective. It measures the accomplishment of an objective not only based on instructor's opinion but also on the actual students' assessments results related to that specific objective. For abstraction, the model is consisted of a several layered architecture and a main assessment process. A specialized tool which follows this proposed model has been also developed. It supports a course reviewer to accurately evaluate the accomplishment of each and every indented learning objective within a course. The reviewer's evaluation will be basically based on the averaged students' scores and the instructor's own rating. In addition, this tool will provide the reviewer with the ability to back-track that averaged score to its original assessment objects' scores.