The Growth-Oriented Assessment for Learning Framework (GOAL)

---

⏤ 🟡 DRAFT – EARLY WORK IN PROGRESS 🟡 ⏤

---

A doctoral focus, a work in progress, and an invitation

Welcome! We’re glad you found us! The Growth-Oriented Assessment for Learning (GOAL) Framework is a values-based pedagogical framework. The aim of this project is nothing less than to reimagine learning assessment in higher education, building from decades of scholarship and proven methods across ungrading, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), labor-based and specifications grading, trauma-informed pedagogy, and anti-oppressive teaching practices.

The GOAL Framework project enters this rich community, motivated by the growing urgency of today’s intersecting challenges — including student mental health, systemic inequities, faculty burnout, attacks on higher education, and concerns related to increasingly powerful and ubiquitous AI technologies.

GOAL is a forward-looking framework that faculty can explore and adopt at their own pace, with the shared aim of making learning assessment more equitable, sustainable, and meaningful.

In this fraught environment, rather than functioning as a tool for sorting or gatekeeping as traditional grading so often does, learning assessment within the GOAL Framework becomes a collaborative, reflective process that centers belonging, trust, and deep learning.

GOAL provides a practical and principled foundation for transforming assessment into a driver of inclusive, meaningful, and sustainable teaching and learning.

The GOAL Framework is a living, growing toolkit, a call to action, and an invitation to join an expanding community of faculty, scholars, students, administrators, and other stakeholders committed to reshaping learning assessment in service of equity and holistic student flourishing.

I hope you’ll join us.

In community –
Iris S. De Lis

Next: An Introduction to the GOAL Framework →