Viewpoint: President Lane Glenn

An Outcome We Can All Agree On

President Glenn, a leader of Massachusetts public higher education’s work in student learning outcomes assessment, reflects on the many payoffs of robust assessment for teaching, learning, and students’ future careers.


The heart of learning assessment is this: faculty who are experts in their fields determining the most important things students must know and be able to do in order to demonstrate mastery; assessing that mastery through a variety of “authentic” activities; and using the results of those assessments to improve teaching and learning.

Then doing it all over again.

And again.

For a community college like Northern Essex, an effective system of learning outcomes assessment has tremendous benefits:

And that’s a learning outcome we can all agree on.


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