Identifying Department/Program Goals

The assessment process is based on your articulating your department/program’s learning goals. Goals can be stated in the format, “when students complete our program (major, program, core course) they should be able to….”

Your disciplinary accrediting agency may dictate the learning goals, and you can skip this step but if you wish you can add goals that align with NJCU’s mission statement or align directly with  our University - wide student learning goals.

These should be goals upon which the department has agreed. The department does not need to state all possible goals, but it should try to articulate its most important ones. If the department cannot agree on goals, select those on which there is some agreement. If the department serves two or more distinct types of students, some goals may apply only to one type of student.

Collect your already existing goal statements:

• Goals for past accreditations

• Goals created by curriculum committees.

• Goals established by your disciplinary society or in the literature of your discipline.

• Goals established with help of your industry advisory group (if you don’t have such a group, you should strongly consider creating such a group).

• Work from the mission and student learning goals statements of our University and College. NJCU regional accrediting commission will want to know the explicit link between your departmental/program goals and the College and University.

For departmental purposes, goals will need to be made specific so that they imply criteria for evaluating those performances. For example, if one of NJCU’s university-wide goals is critical thinking, the history department could interpret that goal as “Students will be able to write historical arguments in which they define a debatable issue in the field, take a position, defend the position with appropriate historical evidence, and address counterarguments” Such a statement implies that students in a senior history course could be asked to write a historical argument and the faculty could evaluate it by the criteria implied in the goal statement.

If the department cannot agree on a comprehensive list of all its learning goals, do not spend an excessive amount of time trying to get such list. Instead, take one or two goals on which the department does agree and begin to find out how well students are achieving those goals and how the curriculum and pedagogy of the department serves those goals.