Mission Statement

The main purpose of the Learning and Assessment Center is to respond to the mandate for more assessment, in particular, more task-specific assessment of students enrolled in the health professions colleges at Michigan State University. This assessment will serve the learning needs of students(formative assessment), as well as the needs of faculty to see that students have become proficient at key tasks and skills (summative assessment). Producing graduates who have basic skills and abilities required of the next stage of training or practice is the focus. A natural outgrowth of this goal is to influence the educational processes within each college: it is expected that the resources of the LAC will support curriculum change, creating curricula that are much more competency-oriented, indeed competency-driven, than before. Aggregation of students’ performance data will  provide the necessary programmatic assessment and accountability.
 
In addition to the mandate noted above, is a broader vision that seeks to serve the needs in the external environments of the health systems that MSU’s health colleges touch.  This vision sees making the LAC available to trainees in graduate medical education, to hospital-based health professionals and to practitioners, all of whom are in need of various opportunities to practice and demonstrate proficiency with tasks that are basic to the provision of effective and safe care to patients and clients.