ABSTRACT
Growing emphasis on assessment in higher education inevitably, and properly, spills over into the global arena. The heightened focus on global education, and the newly competitive international environment, generate their own pressures on individual institutions to take stock of global activities. Moves toward formalizing leadership and organizational structure bring questions about outcomes in their wake—and also, hopefully, facilitate the development of an assessment process. Assessment must also weave together various facets of global education. Activity surveys help, but efforts focused on student outcomes must grapple with obvious differentials, for example, in types of majors or access to study abroad. It is easiest to assess students with considerable global exposure. Assessing Student Competence Discussions about possibilities for learning assessment in the global arena—as opposed to activities and organizational censuses—began in the early 1980s, a testimony to the quick realization that a new push in curriculum and co-curriculum had to be justified by some willingness to probe learning results.
