Outcome Development
The official outcomes adopted by the university have been adapted in conversation with faculty, deans, and administrators of both academic program and academic support units. But the formalized creation of the original outcomes were developed by staff from Institutional Effectiveness in 2017, who took a bottom-up approach to developing the university-wide learning outcomes. These outcomes have been a part of annual assessment reports for many years, but have never been analyzed from a university-wide perspective until recently. Based on an extensive content analysis, these staff members evaluated 957 outcomes from 207 academic and 23 academic support units. Of the 957 outcomes, 789 (82.4%) were designated as learning outcomes and the remainder were program outcomes. A synthesis of these 789 learning outcomes revealed 10 broad themes as defined by the Degree Qualifications Profiles and the Council for Advanced Standards (CAS). These original themes are summarized as follows along with the number of outcomes from the academic programs and academic support units:
- Specialized/discipline knowledge 317 (40.4%)
- Career decisions 150 (19.1%)
- Communication fluency 115 (14.6%)
- Scientific and scholarly inquiry 114 (14.5%)
- Engaging diverse perspectives 47 (6.0%)
- Collaborative skills 16 (2.0%)
- Quantitative literacy 11 (1.4%)
- Global and civic engagement 9 (1.1%)
- Ethical reasoning 3 (0.4%)
- Intrapersonal development 3 (0.4%)
The content analysis was conducted primarily by two staff members. They first used a loose coding technique to identify broad themes, and then distilled those themes into the ten outcome categories. They each re-read the outcomes and matched each one to one of the categories, following a pre-defined content analysis protocol. Each staff member completed the coding on her own and then validated her research with the other. Whenever they could not agree into which category a learning outcome would fit, they consulted a member of the Institutional Effectiveness Committee. An Excel spreadsheet contains the results of this analysis, mapping every learning outcome at the institution into one of these 10 learning outcome categories.
In consultation with the deans' offices and several academic support programs, including Student Affairs and the Career Center, these outcomes were fine-tuned and are now formally adopted into annual assessment cycles from a more centralized perspective. A revised map of learning outcomes demonstrates the connect among all of the university's assessment plans.
Linkage to Specialized Accreditation
MSU holds accreditation with more than 25 specialized accreditation agencies. Many of these accrediting bodies have identified learning outcomes or competencies for their respective academic units. These units have already incorporated these outcomes into their annual IE report where possible. For example, the undergraduate units with the School of Engineering have identified the 7 ABET competencies as their desired learning outcomes. These learning outcomes were included in the content analysis described above, and the majority of them overlap with the 8 university student learning outcomes.