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Defining & Embodying Excellence in Assessment

As defined by NILOA’s Excellence in Assessment standards, best practice in assessment includes not only the iterative use of sound methodologies to improve student learning, but also transparency of goals, objectives, activities, outcomes and actions. With this addition to the CILMAR web pages, our goal is twofold: to deepen our engagement with attaining excellence and to invite others into a “ brave space” of transparency about process, power and change.

A Brief History of Our Cycle of Assessment

Prior to CILMAR’s creation in the fall of 2016, leaders of the various Purdue Intercultural Learning programs which pre-dated CILMAR had been experimenting with an annual cycle of program-level assessment for about 18 months.  These early efforts at being intentional about our desired outcomes and annual progress gained immensely in focus and clarity with the formalization of a vision and mission statement for CILMAR as a teaching, learning and research center.

With a change in leadership, CILMAR’s first formal cycle of assessment was begun in academic year 2017-2018. One of the principal goals for this first annual cycle of assessment was defining excellence in a way that moved beyond numbers of students, staff or faculty members who participated in or were ‘satisfied’ with a program.  As almost any instructor or coach can tell you, participation predicts neither learning nor excellence of learning outcomes. Given the existence of pre-existing programs, an important task of the first two cycles of assessment was bringing all programs into alignment with CILMAR's missions.

Our cycle of assessment runs on a calendar year cycle and has so far produced several sets of plans and reports which close the loop on our assessment and demonstrate alignment of our efforts with our vision and mission statements.

 Yearly Plans and Reports 

To review documents and outcomes of the CILMAR cycle of assessment, please see:

You can also see the same documents gathered into a Collection by logging into the Intercultural Learning Hub.