An Introduction to the GOAL Framework
Learning assessment is one of the most powerful forces shaping student experience in higher education. Yet too often, traditional grading functions less as a tool for learning than as a mechanism for sorting, ranking, and exclusion. These practices reinforce inequities, erode belonging, and misrepresent how people actually learn.
This is where GOAL — Growth-Oriented Assessment for Learning — begins.
GOAL responds to what students consistently tell us:
- “I am struggling — please see me.”
- “I don’t know what this grade means — or how to grow from it.”
- “I feel like I’m alone in this.”
- “I want to do meaningful work — not just jump through hoops.”
GOAL is not a grading system, but a living framework designed to center learning, equity, and care. It synthesizes decades of scholarship on ungrading, mastery/specifications grading, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), trauma-informed pedagogy, disability justice, and critical traditions in education. It also engages with their critiques — drawing on Carillo, Dolmage, Price, Crenshaw, Yosso, and others — to anticipate inequities rather than retrofitting solutions after the fact.
The framework is articulated through five interdependent pillars:
- Pillar One: Learning for Flourishing — centering the flourishing of all students as the purpose of assessment, anticipating barriers before they appear.
- Pillar Two: Process and Pathway Visibility — making diverse processes and strategies visible and valued, without reducing equity to raw labor.
- Pillar Three: Iteration and Flexible Pacing — embedding cycles of revision, reflection, and feedback, recognizing that learning is nonlinear and requires time.
- Pillar Four: Authenticity and Agency — designing assessments that connect to students’ lives and disciplines, while affirming diverse ways of knowing and enabling students to shape their own demonstrations of learning.
- Pillar Five: Equity and Flexibility by Design — embedding access, flexibility, and justice from the outset, so no student has to fight, disclose, or explain in order to belong.
Together, these pillars form a coherent, pragmatic, and justice-oriented foundation for assessment. GOAL invites educators to design systems that are rigorous and sustainable, while also humanizing and inclusive. Assessment becomes not only a measure of achievement but also a practice of belonging, growth, and care.