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RESEARCH PRODUCT

International Performance Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (iPAL): Research and Development

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description

Educators and policy makers now recognize how important and necessary it is to assess student learning outcomes (SLOs) in higher education. The question has shifted from whether such outcomes should be measured to how they should be measured. Today SLOs are typically assessed by student self-reports of learning or with multiple-choice and short-answer tests. Each of these methods has its strengths and limitations; each one provides insights into the nature of teaching and learning. An alternative approach is the assessment of performance using “criterion” tasks that are drawn from real-world situations in which students are being educated, both within and across academic or professional domains. The international Performance Assessment of Learning (iPAL) project, described herein, consolidates previous research and moves to the next generation of performance assessments for local, national, and international use. iPAL, a voluntary collaborative of scholars and practitioners, seeks to develop, research, and use performance assessments of college students’ twenty-first-century skills (e.g., critical thinking, written communication, quantitative literacy, civic competency and engagement, intercultural perspective-taking) for both instructional improvement and accountability purposes.