About

Our mission is to improve student learning through academic program assessment. Assessment is faculty-driven and faculty-supervised. It is a collaborative process that includes faculty, students, staff, administrators, and others. It involves establishing student learning outcomes, measuring/observing and documenting the extent to which outcomes are achieved, findings ways to improve, and implementing improvement plans.

The Assessment and Curriculum Support Center (formerly the Assessment Office)

  • Supports the use of program and institutional assessment to improve the quality of student learning
  • Collaborates with faculty, staff, students, and administrators to establish meaningful, manageable, and sustainable assessment
  • Disseminates assessment-related information
  • Assists programs with designing effective educational programs

We do the following:

  • Workshops for faculty
  • Consultations with faculty and tailored workshops for programs
  • Events for students, faculty, administrators
  • General Education assessment in collaboration with faculty members
  • Research educational contexts to determine what contributes to student learning
  • Disseminate good assessment practices, examples, guides (see “How-to...” and “Resources“)


Who we are

Yao Z. Hill, Ph.D., is a faculty specialist in the Assessment and Curriculum Support Center at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She assists with program learning outcomes assessment projects and coordinates institutional learning assessment activities. She specializes in faculty professional development in learning assessment. She has over 10 years of experience in program evaluation, educational measurement, and learning assessment. She initiated the assessment-leadership building model at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, which external reviewers stated is one of the nation’s best. She has offered over one hundreds workshops and 170 consultations on the topic of assessment, evaluation, and curriculum development. She is currently the President of Hawaiʻi-Pacific Evaluation Association and a member of the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education (AALHE) Recruitment and Retention Committee.

MB Ogawa, Ph.D. is a faculty specialist in the Assessment and Curriculum Support Center and the Information and Computer Sciences Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He supports assessment programs on campus and coordinates professional development opportunities. His work in program evaluation includes experiences in higher education and K12 environments.

TJ Buckley is an MLISc student in the Library & Information Science Department. His research interests include open scholarly communication, methods of facilitating cross-disciplinary scholarship, and evidence-based program development in higher education. He joined the Center as a Graduate Assistant in 2023 and assists Dr. Stitt-Bergh and Dr. Hill with assessment reports, workshop facilitation, and clerical tasks.

Austin Directo is our Program Assistant, specializing in media production and graphic design. He is an undergraduate student in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and has been pursuing a degree in Cinematic Arts since 2022. He has a great interest in writing, editing, and video production. He joined the Center in 2024 as a Media Specialist and he hopes to help the Center tell its stories through the use of technology, visual media, and design.


We thank Monica Stitt-Bergh for her significant contributions over 15 years to the birth and growth of the center:

Monica Stitt-Bergh, Ph.D. Effective December 1, 2023, Dr. Stitt-Bergh is the Interim Director of Program Development and Review in the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Excellence.
Dr. Stitt-Bergh is an educational psychologist, and along with Dr. Marlene Lowe, she started what was then called the Assessment Office in 2008. Her specialization is in teaching and assessing written communication. While in the Assessment and Curriculum Support Center, she provided technical support, generated resource materials, and assisted with learning outcomes assessment, program evaluation, and curriculum development. She also planned and collaborated on institution-level assessment projects. Previously (1993-2008), she assisted with UHM’s writing-across-the-curriculum program, oversaw the writing placement exam for first-year writing, and helped implement a new general education program. Her classroom experience includes teaching first-year writing and social science research methods courses. Dr. Stitt-Bergh has published and given conference presentations on learning outcomes assessment, equity in assessment, data visualization, program evaluation, and writing-across-the-curriculum. Her service work includes leading the Learning Improvement Community and being a design team member of UHM’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Campus Center. She is a former president of the Association for the Assessment of Learning in Higher Education and of the Hawai‘i-Pacific Evaluation Association. She holds a BA in English (University of Michigan), an MA in Composition and Rhetoric and PhD in Educational Psychology (UHM). Her recent work includes a book chapter (co-authored), “Centering ‘āina in assessment: Striving for equity and social justice,” in Reframing assessment to center equity: Theories, models, and practice and a co-authored article, “Fields, professions, and disciplines: Exploring professional identity in assessment” in Research and Practice in Assessment.

View Monica’s curriculum vitae. You may also view Monica’s work on her ResearchGate page or her Academia.edu page.

Updated on 1/22/2024