ABSTRACT
The college or university course is an intuitive unit of analysis when it comes to measuring student learning. Research on the assessment of student learning has taken place for decades and that includes both broad examinations of assessment and specific recommendations for course-embedded assessment. The Gallup-Purdue Index's inaugural study found that 'graduates who had at least one professor who made them excited about learning, cared about them as a person, and was a mentor, have more than double the odds of being engaged at work and thriving in well-being'. In examining the essential role of alignment in creating an instructional environment focused on student learning, it is first necessary to express an assessment-based mea culpa. Human beings are meaning-making machines. Beyond discipline-specific or content-specific outcomes, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) has delineated 16 learning outcomes, from critical thinking and communication skills to ethical reasoning and integrative learning, deemed essential to undergraduate education.
