1. Awareness/Exposure

• The awareness level corresponds to the "Knowledge" level in Bloom's taxonomy, and the "Worth being familiar with" category in Understanding by Design.
• Learning activities related to the outcome must be a required part of the course, but there is no minimum performance requirement for the students to meet.
• To assess student achievement of awareness with respect to an outcome you must document that all students have been exposed to information related to the learning outcome ­ for example you might document that all students attended a presentation on a topic related to the outcome and wrote a short summary on the topic.

2. Competence/Ability

• The competence level corresponds to the "Comprehension and Application" levels in Bloom's taxonomy, and the "Important to know and do" category in Understanding by Design.
• Learning activities related to the outcome must be a required part of the course, and there must also be clearly defined assessment activities with clearly defined minimum performance requirements that the students must meet to demonstrate ability with respect to the outcome.
• Student achievement of competence/ability for an outcome can be demonstrated by defining an acceptable level of performance on an appropriate assessment activity and directly assessing whether or not each student meets or exceeds that level of performance. For example, to demonstrate effective oral communication you could set the assessment activity as a formal presentation and you could set several performance criteria including items like "speaks clearly and with sufficient volume" and "responds effectively to questions and comments", then when each student makes their presentation you can assess with a simple yes/no rating whether or not each student meets each performance criteria and you can track the percentage of students who met all (or some acceptable number) of the performance criteria. This percentage should be recorded and used for comparison with previous and future results for this outcome to track continuous improvement.

3. Mastery/Understanding

• The mastery level corresponds to the "Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation" levels in Bloom's taxonomy, and the "Enduring understanding" category in Understanding by Design.
• Learning activities related to the outcome must be a required part of the course, there must be assessment activities with clearly defined minimum performance requirements that the students must meet to demonstrate both ability and understanding, there must be significant formative feedback given to the students on the learning activities and/or assessment activities, and there must be some required reflection to force the students to synthesize and process information related to the outcome.
• Student achievement of mastery for an outcome can be demonstrated by defining an acceptable level of performance on an appropriate assessment activity (the activity must extend beyond doing to include evaluating) and documenting that all students who passed the course met or exceeded that level of performance. For example, an appropriate assessment activity could be a project that requires the student to solve an open-ended problem by synthesizing information learned in other contexts and critically evaluating the result rather than merely reporting an answer, and a mastery learning procedure could be followed requiring recycling until understanding is clearly demonstrated. For additional ideas on assessing understanding see Understanding By Design (in particular see the Rubric for the Six facets of understanding - Explanation, Interpretation, Application, Perspective, Empathy, Self-Knowledge - on pages 76-77).

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* From Bloom's Taxonomy (For Reference):
Evaluation (Employment of internal or external criteria for making critical judgments); Synthesis (Combining elements into a whole); Analysis (Breaking down a problem into its component parts); Application (Solving new problems with familiar principles); Comprehension (Translation of a concept into a somewhat different form); Knowledge (Recall of factual material in similar form)

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