The Faculty Learning Outcome Assessment Framework

Assessment is a cyclical process within which educators construct outcomes, implement programs, assess constructs such as learning, evaluate results, and utilize results to craft stronger programs and services. Within educational and faculty development, assessment measures program impact on faculty, students, and/or institutional culture. Additionally, assessment activities support the scholarly dissemination of evidence-based and high-impact practices. Unfortunately, many centers of teaching and learning struggle to implement assessment practices that go beyond satisfaction-based program evaluations. This struggle can be attributable to multiple factors, including weak assessment infrastructure, shortsighted assessment goals, ill-conceived frameworks, and limited resources to do more than collect satisfaction data. We present an assessment framework that addresses these limitations by organizing center assessment efforts around faculty learning outcomes (FLOs). This framework focuses on the impact center programming has on faculty while also providing feedback on program quality and important information about institutional culture. More importantly, the multi-tiered FLO framework allows centers to systematically collect multiple data sources for each FLO. Comprehensive analysis of these FLO-driven data sources gives centers a new and more robust tool for understanding center effectiveness and evidencing the value of faculty development in higher education to diverse stakeholders.