The Lumina Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP): implications for assessment

In January 2011, the Lumina Foundation published its Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) to challenge faculty and academic leaders in the US to think about aligning expectations for student learning outcomes across higher education. Since then, the DQP has kindled extensive discussions about what the postsecondary degrees granted by American colleges and universities really mean with respect to what graduates know and can do. But the text of the DQP itself provides only limited guidance to stakeholders with respect to assessment. In order to render the profile's potential real, institutions and their faculties will need to develop consistent and systematic ways to gather evidence that the competencies that the DQP describes are actually being mastered at the levels claimed. In this paper, the author explores some of what needs to be done in this area and provides a few tools and techniques (some of which are already in widespread use) that may help meet this challenge. In offering them, the author invites faculties at colleges and universities to carefully examine what the DQP requires in designing more aligned and integrated approaches to teaching, learning, and determining student competence, as well as to actively experiment with these ideas and techniques with colleagues.

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