are explicit statements describing knowledge, skills, abilities, and/or attitudes that a student will be able to demonstrate at the end (or as a result) of his or her engagement in a particular lesson, course, program, or collegiate experience.
Welcome to the Berkeley City College (BCC) Learning Outcomes and Assessment website. BCC is committed to evidence-based decision-making for continuous improvement of student achievement and success and elimination of equity gap in disproportionately impacted student groups.
Outcomes and Assessments play a critical role in BCC to achieve this goal. Led by the College’s Assessment Committee, the College engages in a 3-year cycle of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) assessment, Program Learning Assessment (PLO), and annual review of the Institutional Learning Outcomes (ILO).
This page will provide you with BCC’s Learning Outcomes and Assessment framework, Cycle, Timeline, and institutional calendar of Learning Outcomes and Assessment schedule.
In addition, there is resource information regarding CurriQunet Meta which is the tool and repository of all information relative to SLO, PLO, and ILO for instruction, Student Services, Academic Support Services, and Administrative Services. You can review the instructions for using CurriQunet Meta so you can review the most current SLOs, assessment results, action plans, and outcomes of the action plans.
Please use this site to find information about student learning outcomes (SLOs) and SLO assessment, as they relate to specific courses, programs, student services, and institutional learning outcomes at Berkeley City College.
CurriQunet is the repository for all information about SLOs and SLO assessment at BCC. It contains the most current versions of SLOs for all courses, instructional programs, and student services areas. See the instructions for using CurriQunet (on the left) to view SLOs, assessment results, action plans, and results of action plans.
On this site, you can also find an overview of the SLO assessment process and other information about SLO assessments at BCC.
To create or update SLOs, work with your assessment liaison and department chair.
If you’re interested in continually improving instruction in the classes you teach, please consider using some of the classroom assessment techniques described here.
Finally, the Teaching and Learning Center (see link on the left) is a powerful tool at BCC for closing the loop on assessments by providing a venue for faculty to collaboratively arrive at and implement action plans related to assessment findings. The focused inquiry groups (FIGs) are used primarily to develop action plans, and the action plan projects for learning excellence (APPLEs) are used to implement those plans.
Please feel free to send related questions and comments to Kelly Pernell at kpernell@peralta.edu.
What is SLO Assessment?
At BCC, for each course and program, we conduct original research relating to student learning outcomes (SLOs) in order to gain insight into how effectively we are teaching and students are learning. We apply the results of that research in order to improve instruction and student services. The details of these research initiatives, findings, and related plans for improvement are stored in Curricunet (see the Curricunet link and instructions for accessing Curricunet, both to the left).
Each SLO assessment uses a specific tool to measure how well students are achieving SLO’s. This tool can be an essay, test, student performance, survey, or other indicator of student achievement. The faculty or other parties (in the case of student services, for example) choose the most appropriate tool and, if necessary (when the measure is an essay or student performance, for example), develop a rubric or other measurement instrument which can be consistently applied, as well as a system for applying the measure with a high level of accuracy; for example, if they use a rubric, multiple raters might score the different criteria, in which case these scores would be compared to ensure their reliability.
After the assessment is complete, those faculty and/or other parties most involved in the specific SLO’s analyze the results and determine how to use them to improve students’ success in achieving SLO’s. For example, they might decide to change or augment instruction in a particular way, change curriculum, or improve future SLO assessments in a specific way. This ends the first cycle of assessment and leads to revisiting the student learning outcomes and starting a new cycle.
Developing Student Learning Outcomes
Please express each student learning outcome as a phrase which begins with a verb and broadly expresses what students will be able to do when they complete the course (for example, “identify the central figures, movements, and events that have shaped the African American experience” or “use advanced techniques from a bitmap imaging program to generate digital images”). The SLO should be “measurable.”
Assessment Methods
- ILO assessment – Samples of work from this class will be included in the ILO assessment this semester.
- Essay assessments – a rubric developed by the department will be applied to essays from this course. The categories in the rubric will be clearly tied to SLOs for the course.
- Test questions – Student responses to collected test questions will be assessed in relation to course SLOs.
- Surveys – Students will be surveyed in relation to their learning of the course SLOs. This assessment tool is appropriate for courses in which a direct assessment is not possible, for example, courses in which students are working on different skills or at different skill levels.
- Other assessment methods, as appropriate to the course – Please be specific as to the tool and method of assessment.
Findings and Analysis
After assessing…
Action Plans
The following are not strong action plans:
- The teachers will focus on the following areas…
- The teachers will improve instruction in the following areas…
These are not clear, specific improvements that are likely to result in improved student learning.
The following are strong action plans:
- The course outline will be changed in the following significant and specific ways:
- Teachers of this course will participate in a focused inquiry group (FIG) or Action Plan Project for Learning Excellence (APPLE), as follows:
- The following additional course materials will be developed (include attachments of the new course materials):
- The course sequence will be changed as follows:
- The SLOs will be changed as follows:
- The assessment tool and/or assessment process will be changed in the following significant way(s):
- The course textbook will be changed so that the new textbook meets the following criteria:
- Course assignments will be changed in the following specific way(s):
- Online materials will be developed for the course as follows: