Aligning Assessment and Accreditation Through Learning Outcomes

One of the questions I hear frequently from educator preparation programs sounds something like this:

We have institutional learning outcomes, program learning outcomes, course learning outcomes, state standards, professional standards, key assessments, and accreditation expectations. How are we supposed to make all of this fit together without creating a separate assessment system for each one?

That’s definitely a reasonable and fair question to ask. I think it points to one of the places where assessment and accreditation can become unnecessarily complicated.

When assessment is treated as one activity and accreditation as another, we tend to create parallel systems. Faculty collect data for assessment. Accreditation teams collect evidence for reviewers. Institutional effectiveness offices collect another set of data. Before long, everyone is collecting something, but we are not necessarily learning very much from any of it. Or, we have no idea what data lives where and how to access it.

There is a more effective way to align everything together and make it work.

When institutional, program, and course learning outcomes are intentionally connected, assessment becomes the method for understanding whether our programs are accomplishing what we say they are accomplishing. Accreditation then becomes the story we tell about that evidence. Continuous improvement becomes what we do next.

Start with the Logic, Not the Acronyms

ILOs. PLOs. CLOs.

We use these terms so often that it is easy to focus on the labels rather than how they all connect together. Institutional learning outcomes describe what graduates of the institution should know, do, or value. Program learning outcomes describe what graduates of a particular program should be able to demonstrate. Course learning outcomes identify what students should learn and demonstrate within an individual course.

The important part is not knowing the definitions. The important part is being able to see how they work together. The relationship should be intentional and vertical. Course outcomes should contribute to program outcomes. Program outcomes should connect to institutional expectations, strategic goals, and mission. Candidates should have opportunities across the curriculum to learn, practice, receive feedback, and ultimately demonstrate the competencies we say matter.

Biggs' (1996) work on constructive alignment provides an important foundation for this idea: curriculum, instruction, and assessment should align with the intended learning outcomes. That sounds fairly straightforward, right?

In practice, however, alignment can become much more complicated, especially after years of curriculum revisions, new courses, changing standards, new faculty, new processes, and various accreditation requirements layered onto existing systems.

That is why I encourage programs to stop looking at the individual pieces and examine the whole picture.

Before You Build Another Assessment, Ask Why

One of the patterns I see is programs beginning with the assessment instrument.

We need a key assessment.

We need a rubric.

We need evidence for this standard.

With all of these ideas, an assessment gets created, and afterward everyone tries to determine which outcomes and standards it can be mapped to. Technically, you may end up with an assessment matrix, but that does not necessarily mean you have alignment. Backwards mapping works, if done correctly and intentionally.

I like to begin with three questions:

• What do we want candidates to know and be able to do when they complete this program?
• Where do they have meaningful opportunities to learn, practice, and receive feedback on those competencies?
• What authentic evidence would actually convince us that they can do it?

Only then should we ask what assessment will provide that evidence. This is a critical distinction. If we begin with the evidence we genuinely need to understand candidate learning, the resulting assessment can serve several meaningful purposes. It can provide feedback to the candidate, information to faculty, evidence about a program learning outcome, and data for continuous improvement.

If we begin with “What artifact do we need for accreditation?” we often end up collecting something that nobody looks at again until the next review. As Brink & Teaching and Learning Educators’ Network for Transformation (2020) reminds us, good assessment is not about collecting more data. It is about collecting useful data and doing something meaningful with it.

Follow One Outcome Through the Program

One of my favorite alignment protocols is also one of the simplest: Pick one program learning outcome and follow it, from beginning to end.

Suppose a program expects candidates to use student data to design and adjust instruction. We need to know: Where the competency first introduced; where candidates practice it; where they receive feedback; where it’s assessed; if it is tied to clinical practice; and where the program looks at the resulting data.

This can be surprisingly revealing. Sometimes we discover that an outcome is introduced repeatedly but never meaningfully assessed. Sometimes it appears in one course and then disappears. Sometimes a signature assignment is supposedly measuring the outcome, but when we look closely at the assignment and rubric, candidates could earn a high score without actually demonstrating the competency.

I do not view those discoveries as accreditation failures, rather they are opportunities to understand the curriculum better. Accreditation helps us uncover the issue, but fixing it makes the program stronger for candidates. That is an important distinction.

An alignment matrix should therefore be more than a document we produce for reviewers. When used effectively and purposefully, it becomes a diagnostic tool. It can reveal gaps, unnecessary duplication, over-assessed outcomes, and places where expectations need to be reinforced. It also gives faculty a much clearer picture of how individual courses contribute to the program as a whole.

Make Sure the Evidence is Actually Telling You Something

Once outcomes and assessments are aligned, the next question is whether the resulting data are useful. This is where assessment systems can become very large without becoming particularly informative. A program may have dozens of assessments, multiple surveys, clinical evaluations, dispositions data, licensure results, completer data, employer feedback, and other measures. That is a lot of evidence, but more evidence does not automatically mean better evidence.

I encourage programs to ask: What decision could we make with this information? Can we make our programs better? Can we make an impact?

The same evidence can, and often should, serve multiple purposes. A signature assignment used for course grading can also provide program-level evidence if it meaningfully measures a PLO and the scoring criteria are appropriate. A clinical observation instrument can provide formative feedback to candidates while also revealing patterns across entire cohorts. Completer and employer surveys can inform program improvement while supporting accreditation and institutional effectiveness.

The goal is not to make every piece of evidence do everything. It is to stop creating duplicate evidence systems when one well-designed system can answer multiple meaningful questions.

Alignment is Only the Beginning

This is probably the part of assessment work I care about most. Alignment is not the finish line. You can have a beautiful curriculum map, perfectly written outcomes, carefully designed rubrics, and an impressive assessment dashboard and still not have continuous improvement. Eventually someone has to ask:

What did we learn?

What does the evidence tell us?

Is the pattern meaningful?

Does it look different when we disaggregate the data?

Do faculty see the same thing in candidate work?

Are our partners seeing it in clinical practice?

And most importantly, what are we going to do about it?

Suppose assessment data suggest that candidates are struggling to analyze student work and adjust instruction. The response should not end with documenting the finding in an annual report. Go back into the curriculum and figure out where the competency is taught, how often candidates practice it, is the feedback they receive meaningful to their overall success, how the faculty are interpreting the rubric criteria, if the clinical evaluation provides similar evidence, and what the mentor teachers or university supervisors are seeing,

Then make a thoughtful change. Afterward, collect evidence again and ask whether the change made a difference. That is the improvement loop:

Outcomes → Evidence → Analysis → Action → New Evidence

I would add one more element that is sometimes overlooked: Reflection.

We need to discover what we learned from the change and then take the proper next steps. That is when assessment becomes useful rather than performive.

Calibration Matters More Than We Sometimes Admit

Stakeholder calibration is another piece of alignment that deserves attention. A rubric may be beautifully aligned to a program learning outcome, but if five faculty members interpret its criteria five different ways, the resulting program-level data may not tell us what we think they do. This is why calibration should not be treated as something we do only before an accreditation visit.

I bring faculty, adjunct instructors, P-12 teachers and principals, and other outside stakeholders from the Advisory Board all together to look at candidate work, score it, discuss why one person saw “proficient” while another saw “developing,” examine the language in the rubric, and find out if the criteria actually represent the competency the program intended to measure.

Those conversations do more than improve scoring consistency; they create shared understanding about what quality looks like across the program. Believe it or not, sometimes the most important outcome of a calibration session is discovering that the rubric needs improvement, not the person using it. That is powerful evidence!

Disaggregation Can Change the Story

Program-level averages are helpful, but they can also hide important information. A program may appear to be meeting an outcome overall while particular groups of candidates, pathways, or clinical settings are experiencing something very different. That is why disaggregation matters; the purpose is not to produce more tables, but to ask better questions.

Are candidates in one pathway performing differently from candidates in another?

Do online and site-based candidates demonstrate the same competencies?

Are there differences across clinical placements?

Do patterns appear across demographic groups?

Are certain rubric criteria consistently weaker than others?

Sometimes the aggregate tells us that everything is fine.

The disaggregated evidence tells us where the improvement opportunity actually lives. Again, the goal is not more data; it is better understanding.

CAEP, AAQEP, and the Alignment Story

CAEP and AAQEP approach evidence somewhat differently, but both ultimately expect programs to present a coherent case for quality. CAEP emphasizes connections among standards, evidence, assessment quality, and candidate performance, including attention to validity, reliability, fairness, and disaggregated evidence. AAQEP provides programs with an opportunity to develop an evidence-based and contextually grounded case for quality, with continuous improvement at the center of the process. Regardless of the framework, programs with strong alignment are in a much better position to explain themselves. can show how course-level learning contributes to program outcomes. They can demonstrate how program outcomes connect to broader institutional expectations. They can identify the assessments that provide evidence. They can explain what the evidence means. Most importantly, they can show what they did because of what they learned. That last part matters. Accreditation is not strengthened because you have more evidence, rather it is strengthened because you understand your evidence.

Faculty Have to Own the Process

None of this works if alignment is something done to faculty. Faculty design the learning experiences. They interact with candidates. They evaluate student work. They see patterns in learning that may never appear on a dashboard. Their expertise is essential. If faculty see assessment primarily as an administrative requirement, we should probably ask ourselves why. We need to make sure everyone has access to the data, knows how to interpret it, engages in meaningful discussions surrounding it, and ensure they have deliberate opportunities to impact the outcomes and assessments they are being asked to implement.

The OECD's (2025) work on quality teaching similarly emphasizes the importance of creating conditions for evidence-informed reflection and collaborative improvement. Faculty need time and structures to have those conversation because when faculty own the assessment process, something changes: The alignment no longer lives only in a spreadsheet, but it lives in the program.

Moving Beyond Compliance

At its best, accreditation should not require us to create an entirely separate version of our program for reviewers. The evidence we present should reflect how the program actually operates. Our learning outcomes should represent what we genuinely want candidates to achieve. Our assessments should tell us whether they are achieving it. Our faculty should regularly examine that evidence. Our partners should contribute to our understanding of candidate and completer performance. Our data should help us identify where experiences or outcomes differ. And when we find something that needs attention, we should make a change and determine whether it worked.

If those things are happening, much of the accreditation story already exists. We are not manufacturing evidence for a self-study. We are documenting the work of a program that knows what it is trying to accomplish, examines whether it is accomplishing it, and continually gets better. That is what assessment should do and that is what accreditation should help us see.

The Bigger Picture

When ILOs, PLOs, CLOs, standards, assessments, and continuous improvement processes are intentionally connected, everyone benefits. Candidates experience a coherent program rather than a collection of unrelated courses. Faculty understand how their teaching contributes to larger program goals. Program leaders can identify patterns and make decisions based on evidence rather than impressions. Institutional leaders can see how program outcomes contribute to institutional priorities. Accreditation actually becomes less about finding evidence and more about explaining what the evidence already tells us. That is a much healthier system. Not because it makes accreditation easier, although it often does, but because it makes assessment more useful. If assessment is not helping us understand and improve student learning, we should probably be asking why we are doing it in the first place.

Point to Ponder

Choose one program learning outcome.

Can you trace it from the institutional mission and program expectations down into individual courses?

Can you identify where candidates learn it, practice it, receive feedback, and demonstrate it?

Can you point to the evidence showing how well they are doing?

And can you name one thing your program changed because of what that evidence told you?

If the trail becomes difficult to follow somewhere along the way, you may have just identified your next continuous improvement opportunity. Not because an accreditation reviewer might ask. Because understanding that connection is what makes the entire system meaningful.

References

• Allen, M. J. (2004). Assessing academic programs in higher education. Anker Publishing.
• Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347–364.
• Brink, S., & Teaching and Learning Educators’ Network for Transformation. (2020). Effective use of large-scale learning assessments to improve learning outcomes and education system reform. UNESCO.
• Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. (2022). CAEP accreditation standards.
• Jankowski, N. A., & Marshall, D. E. (2017). Degrees of alignment: The state of assessment in higher education. National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.