Queen’s University (Kingston) has published a report for a four-year project on Learning Outcomes Assessment funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO).
The findings are important not just for Queen’s University but for the higher education sector as a whole. The project demonstrated that there was a measurable increase in students’ abilities in higher order cognitive skills like critical thinking, problem solving and written communication across a four-year degree. The project also led to important insights about the strengths and limitations of assessment tools, and about student motivation and faculty engagement.
The work on the above-mentioned project relates directly to the Bay View Alliance’s RAC2, focusing on assessment of transferable higher-order skills in higher education. The aim is to build a multi-institutional consortium of universities, all of which will be engaged in measuring learning gains from start to end of an academic program.