Revisiting Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education

Book excerpt: Revisiting Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education compliments rather than updates Hernon and Dugan's 2004 Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education. As with its predecessor, it offers a cross-campus diversity of voices: contributors hail from various segments of higher organizations, an academic vice president, academic deans, a higher education consultant, faculty members, and librarians. Individually, they shed light on how their corner of the higher education universe views, facilitates, and substantiates outcomes assessment. Together, they document what is known about outcomes assessment in the middle of the first decade of the new century, as institutions and their programs take ever-firmer steps from anecdotal evidence to more rigorous diagnosis and reporting.