Educational Effectiveness Assessment at The New School
Overview
The below tree diagram illustrates the structure of Educational Effectiveness Assessment at The New School. Institutional resources support cohesion across local-level assessment practices.
Curriculum Maps
As part of our curriculum map standarization process this Spring, program directors were asked to confirm the relationship between program learning outcomes and the courses in which they are achieved. Program directors indicated in which course outcomes were introduced, developed, advanced, or some combination of these learning stages.
Specific Examples
College of Performing Arts
Program to Highlight: Dramatic Arts (BFA)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- Portfolio (TRDU 2801), a capstone course, teaches PLO’s at the I and D levels; will be further internal conversations to better understand aspects of student learning
Schools of Public Engagement
Program to Highlight: Urban Studies (BA)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- Logical, rational student learning progression throughout program
Parsons School of Design
Program to Highlight: Architecture and Lighting Design (MArch/MFA)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- Faculty in this dual-degree program sat down together to work through how their combined learning outcomes were taught and assessed throughout the joint curriculum
Parsons Paris
Program to Highlight: Strategic Design and Management (BBA)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- First-year courses at Parsons Paris are taught as part of this program
- First-year Program Directors came together to assess learning outcomes taught in this program, as they are taught to all Parsons Paris students prior to their studies in the other 4 programs. They coordinated this work with Parsons School of Design's Director of First Year and Assistant Dean for First Year
- Parsons Paris BBA Strategic Design and Management Director and Associate Director worked hand in hand with their Parsons NYC counterparts to coordinate the maps from sophomore to senior years
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
Program to Highlight: Liberal Arts (BA/BS)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- This program is in the midst of a major curricular redesign and found it difficult to effectively map student learning
- Faculty teaching in the program had to examine courses with significant Liberal Arts student enrollment, speak with those faculty members, and study how their learning outcomes were (or were not) taught
- What they learned is being incorporated into the curricular redesign
New School for Social Research
Program to Highlight: Psychology (MA)
- Important Notes on Curriculum Map:
- Faculty teaching in this program had to consider how their learning outcomes existed within the department; how they related to the BA and PhD versions of Psychology programs
- Faculty also had to consider how students in this program would progress to either the clinical or non-clinical versions of the PhD program, and how the learning outcomes prepared students effectively for success in those programs
- Based on what they learned and observed during mapping, program faculty chose to assess all of their learning outcomes in Spring 2025
Shared Capacities
Shared Capacity Courses by College Assessment
Institution
- The most frequently taught capacity within courses at The New School is Critical Analysis. This suggests that faculty are deeply invested in helping students to both discover themselves, the world around them, and how to succeed academically within the institution.
- The two most infrequently taught capacities within academic programs at The New School are Quantitative Reasoning and Scientific Literacy. Both of these capacities are taught extensively within ULEC and UTNS courses, but they remain a future growth area opportunity for the institution.
College of Performing Arts
- Critical Analysis and Creative Making are taught the most frequently in the College of Performing Arts. These two capacities form the backbone of the Performing Arts Core experience for incoming undergraduate students.
Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
- Comparatively, the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts places additional focus on improving the ability of students to Work in Complex Systems than other TNS colleges. This focus on the interplay of multiple causal factors within modern society serves to encapsulate how Lang approaches the first two years of the undergraduate experience, where students must take two full years of courses before formally declaring a major.
Parsons Paris
- Parsons Paris sees Shared Capacities much in the same way as the Parsons School of Design, but places an additional emphasis on Quantitative Reasoning and Scientific Literacy based on the unique demands of students finding meaningful employment post-graduation. These two capacities, along with Critical Analysis, are the third-most frequently taught within the Parsons Paris curriculum.
Parsons School of Design
- Of all the Shared Capacities, the Parsons School of Design places a heavy emphasis on three: Critical Analysis, Authorship, and Communication. Authorship is a particularly key focus for Parsons students, as each of their undergraduate students spend considerable time in the first-year program learning what it means to create an object, concept, or idea.
Schools of Public Engagement
- The Schools of Public Engagement invest considerable curricular space into two capacities: Critical Analysis and Communication. These foci are shaped in large part by the non-traditional student populations that the college largely serves, as older adults and military veterans often have unique ways of understanding the world.
Program Learning Outcomes Assessment
178 total Program Learning Outcome (PLO) assessments were received by the Provost’s Office in AY 2024-25. While each academic program was required to evaluate one learning outcome across a sample of students, several programs elected to perform multiple assessments due to the interrelated nature of their outcomes. Faculty in these programs plan to use what they learned to inform modifications to their learning outcomes as part of the curricular development process, ensuring that students receive a high-quality and meaningful education at The New School.
These charts shows the range of students each program assessed, by home college and by level. Smaller programs assessed smaller numbers of students, while larger programs evaluated a larger pool of students.
The first-year program at Parsons elected to perform their own assessment of students, and faculty looked at over 170 work products to determine how many successfully met the learning outcome.
Across all of our colleges, 88% (or more) of all students successfully met the assessed learning outcome. This compares favorably with similar assessments performed at other institutions of Higher Education; for example, the University of Florida has several programs which have very low learning success rates.
We look forward to continuing annual program learning outcome assessments, and anticipate potentially higher levels of variation in terms of student success rates.
This graph provides a visual representation of the kinds of student work faculty considered when determining learning outcome achievement. The two most frequent types of student work across the institution were “Exams and Assignments,” and “Capstone Projects.” Several programs chose to review unique types of student work, including “Institutional Review Board (IRB) Applications” and “Oral Projects Presented in Class.”
Specific examples
Example Results from the 24-25 Program Learning Outcomes Assessment (Click to view table)
Disaggregated Data
At the institution and college level, IRDS publishes a range of public dashboards designed to help guide decision-making to a range of stakeholders interested in enrollment, retention, and outcomes for targeted populations, including age, international status, transfer students, ethnicity, and gender. Examples are below, and the full suite of public dashboards are viewable here: Link to TNSPublic Tableau Dashboards
Institutional Research maintains many different kinds of workbooks available to faculty, staff, program directors, and leadership visualizing student-level, course, program, and institutional data. Many workbooks include filters by demographic categories, which facilitate understanding of i.e. outcomes, enrollment, and retention data by demographics for individual programs. IRDS guidelines dictate that program level workbooks are not made publicly visible, but are available for certain groups (i.e. program directors, deans), require an IT request, and are stored on our server/require VPN access. This is because many programs have very small student enrollments, and filtering by demographics can potentially make certain individuals identifiable. While access is limited, a curation of disaggregated program data is available below. We are happy to share more by request.
The Bachelors Programs dashboard, for example, allows users to review program level data by disaggregated population --below is the table of contents for this dashboard and a view of the BFA in Interior Design, showing International vs. Domestic student enrollment every year since Fall 2020.
There are many other examples, including the Census Plus workbook, which provides many different ways of viewing key indicators grouped by targeted populations. It has 369 views over the past four years. The table of contents of this workbook is below, as well as a screenshot of a view of the Graduation and Time to Completion view filtered for Transfer students who graduated from the BBA program at Parsons in Strategic Design and Management --demonstrating, here, a stabilizing headcount and growing 4-year completion rate since the entering class of 2016.
Academic Program Review
This document is based upon the college and institutional assessment plans and contains the long-term schedules for Academic Program Review for all programs.
Job Placement
Based upon our Graduate Outcomes Survey for alumni, we have created a workbook to visualize "further education" and employment rates by program. The below screenshots from this dashboard show this data for the past four cohorts.
Assessment of Assessment
A report on the Spring assessment activities by the University Curriculum Committee's Assessment Subgroup is available here and comes from a broader review of University Curriculum Committee's AY24-25 work, which is viewable here.
Further, the Assessment-Related Events Log (ARELog) is a centralized tool developed in Spring 2025 to support consistent, systematic documentation of assessment activities across the university’s colleges. Through active engagement of College Assessment Point People (CAPPs) during its initial implementation, the ARELog has established a strong foundation for a unified, institution-wide approach to tracking assessment-related events and enhancing visibility into ongoing assessment efforts. Developed through an iterative design and feedback process, the next iteration of planned revisions is in progress, aimed at improving usability, streamlining integration into existing workflows, and supporting strategic long-term sustainability and institutional impact. The improved ARELog is scheduled for rollout for broader use including non-academic units in August 2025.