The National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA), founded in 2008, is based in the College of Education at the University of Illinois and at Indiana University. George Kuh and Stanley Ikenberry serve as co-principal investigators. In addition, NILOA works with several senior scholars including Jillian Kinzie, Pat Hutchings, Peter Ewell, and Timothy Reese Cain.

NILOA's mission is to discover and disseminate ways that academic programs and institutions can productively use assessment data internally to inform and strengthen undergraduate education, and externally to communicate with policy makers, families, and other stakeholders. The organization released a paper titled  "The Lumina Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP):Implications for Assessment" on January 17, 2013. News about the paper's release was included in both Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education:

JANUARY 17, 2013, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Dan Berrett — Students would be likely to learn more in college and academic rigor would be increased, say two higher-education leaders, if faculty members and accountability advocates focused on a deceptively simple idea: Ask students to produce original work and judge them on it, not on how they perform on standardized tests or how many hours they spend in class.

This idea underlies a new paper, by Peter T. Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and its afterword, by Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The paper and afterword were released on Thursday by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, which advocates for the use of assessment data to improve undergraduate education.

Read entire Chronicle of Higher Education article…

JANUARY 17, 2013, INSIDE HIGHER ED — With great fanfare and big names in the student learning world behind it, the Lumina Foundation two years ago unveiled its Degree Qualifications Profile with the hope that it would prod faculty members and college leaders to better define and drive their students to show what they should know and be able to do at various degree levels. Despite experimentation on scores of campuses and by accreditors and others, the profile's impact has been muted, and in a new paper released today by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, two of the crafters of the profile, Peter Ewell and Carol Geary Schneider, seek to give faculty members and administrators reasons (and tools) to embrace its use.

Read entire Inside Higher Ed article…

See the paper abstract…