Assurance of Student Learning Criteria
Criteria for Success and Target
Criteria for Success refers to a narrative/explanation of the level of performance students will have
achieved for your program to have been successful (students will have earned 4/5 for documentation and citation on capstone essays. The criteria for success assists in setting targets. You will use your rubric or
other instrument(s) to set the criterion for student success for each SLO. What level
of achievement would a student demonstrate to be successful? Again, having a good
rubric can give you a description of level of accomplishment for an SLO and also a
numerical indicator in order establish a target for your program. For example, an
assessment committee might evaluate ten essays and score them with a 5-point rubric.
After a discussion, the group could say that an average score of 3.5 would equal success.
Programs need to be able to explain WHY they set the target they set—having a meaningful conversation about the skills/knowledge
the rubric measures will help justify the target selection. Remember this - “Setting
a target is not about guessing what you can achieve. It involves knowing where you are now, what you are trying
to achieve, and determining challenging but realistic amounts of improvement needed
to get there” ~ Gallaudet University
Targets are the composite, numerical goals students in the sample will have achieved for
program success (75% [that’s the target number] of students in the program will have
earned 4/5 on documentation/citation on the rubric). The ASL Template ask for “Program Success Target for this Measurement” and the “Percent of Program Achieving Target.” These should both be recorded as percentages.
Note: Not achieving a target in a given assessment cycle is not necessarily a bad thing
in the eyes of SACSCOC. Remember that the purpose of assessment is improvement, so
not achieving a target provides an opportunity to improve.
Here is a helpful PowerPoint resource for setting targets.
Sample Sizes
Generally speaking, at least 20% of students enrolled in the program should yield
your sample size, with a minimum of five in the sample. So, if your program has 50
total majors, you would evaluate artifacts from 10 randomly selected students (20%
of 50 = 10). If your program has 8 students, you would need to evaluate artifacts
from at least 5, but you could choose to evaluate artifacts from all 8. If you only
have 4 students in your program, you would evaluate artifacts from all of the students.
Many programs are evaluating artifacts from students in capstone courses. If you
have 20 students in your capstone course, but 100 majors, you would evaluate work
from all 20 students. Unless the number is too high, we recommend assessing work
from all students in the capstone. Please indicate the number of students assessed and what proportion of students are
represented in the methods section.
Here are some other resources:
Some of the links on this page may require additional software to view.