Student Learning Outcomes Assessment

The SLOA Committee is committed to fostering a positive culture of assessment on campus. The committee firmly believes that faculty-driven assessments are the most effective means to create a positive assessment culture.

Our assessment process allows faculty to participate and engage in the creation of the assessment instruments and to best decide what instruments will work to measure their course and program outcomes, all within a Canvas-based, systematic assessment data entry structure.

General Education Matriculation (GEM) and Program Assessment are the two primary systematic assessment processes that we use on campus to collect data on student learning outcomes across programs and the general education curriculum.

A lot of the work that SLOA helps initiate across campus is quite qualitative, descriptive and ultimately introspective: assessment discussions and practices, at their best, get faculty members, departments and divisions to look closely at the things they teach, at how well students are or are not learning and to ask (sometimes quite tough) questions about what we might need to change in our classroom or curricular practices. That is what outcomes assessment is really about.

Our discussions about our expectations for students, our course content, our pedagogy and how our teaching reflects and supports the mission of NIC are just as, if not more, important than the raw data itself. The numbers just give us a starting place for these vital conversations about teaching and learning. 

SLOA is directly connected to student success and educational excellence at NIC.

NIC identifies and publishes expected learning outcomes for each of its General Education Matriculation (GEM) areas and for its degree and certificate programs.  Assessment of student learning outcomes at NIC provides information that shows the degree to which the educational outcomes of the college’s programs and general educational areas are being met. Importantly, this assessment data is also directly tied to NIC’s Mission Fulfillment Dashboard, reinforcing its role in institutional decision-making and resource allocation. SLOA leaders working with Institutional Effectiveness have established an institutional benchmark of 87.4% as the threshold for the dashboard’s “goal met” (green) designation, demonstrating the integration of learning outcomes assessment into the institution’s mission fulfillment framework.

Mission, Vision and Values