How will it support student learning?

"Assessment of student learning demonstrates that, at graduation, or other appropriate points, the institution's students have knowledge, skills, and competencies consistent with institutional and appropriate higher education goals" (Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 2007, from Self Study: Creating a Useful Process and Report).

Program assessment provides faculty the opportunity to continually measure the extent to which students are meeting the learning outcomes for their programs. Once programs collect data, they can take time to reflect on the results, and then choose the best course of action in order to improve student learning. Perhaps students need earlier exposure to a key concept or technique critical to the field, maybe curriculum changes need to be made, or perhaps students are meeting a key learning outcome with great success, which is an equally important message to communicate.