“There is no one I have met this century who has thought more deeply about student learning outcomes (SLO) while involving and impacting other educators with his sagacious insights and bold ideas than Jarek Janio. His beautifully written book, Interrogating, Disrupting, and Reframing College Student Learning Outcomes, provides the cornerstone exemplars, vignettes, guidelines, and frameworks for the SLO movement to become highly scalable in a FAST and potentially transformative way. Every page one turns is guaranteed to find utility.”

“Janio writes with conviction and a refreshingly unapologetic, no-nonsense energy about what learning assessment is, and what it should be. He gives strikingly clear language to ideas and frustrations that assessment professionals have wrestled with for years. Readers can find pearls of wisdom throughout the work, such as ‘learning must leave verifiable evidence,’ ‘without observable evidence, assessment collapses into faith,’ and ‘ease of counting, however, is not evidentiary strength.’ I find Janio’s ideas provocative, memorable, and remarkably useful, reflecting years of deep deliberation. This is not an introductory manual to learning assessment; it is a thought-provoking compilation of arguments, reframings, and practical responses to the fundamental challenges that assessment professionals repeatedly find themselves debating, defending, and trying to solve. Readers can quickly find themselves deeply invested in his arguments that turn familiar concepts on their axis: Bloom’s Taxonomy becomes a catalog of actions rather than a staircase for sequencing instruction; rubric criteria describe observable features rather than impressions; AI becomes an evidentiary problem rather than a moral one; assessment evidence is expected to be re-inspectable; transparency is an epistemological requirement rather than an administrative virtue, and conventional dashboards give way to public evidence ledgers that connect claims about learning to actual student work. I found the book genuinely engaging to read.”

“Assessment is not about producing more data, it is about understanding learning well enough to make the student experience even better. Dr. Jarek Janio brings us back to that core purpose in Interrogating, Disrupting, and Reframing College Student Learning Outcomes, which asks us to move beyond the measures that are easiest to count and instead consider what students can actually do, demonstrate, and carry forward from their learning experiences. I appreciate the recognition that students do not enter our classrooms as blank slates; they bring knowledge, skills, and background experiences developed across their lives, workplaces, families, and communities. By challenging educators to make learning visible without losing sight of the people doing the learning, Dr. Janio offers an important challenge to our field to make assessment more human, relevant, and intentional.”

“In this book, Dr. Jarek Janio argues that learning is observable and that we should evolve how we construct instruction to center learning, to the benefit of the student, faculty, and ultimately society. For faculty and higher education leaders, this text is very timely. The strategies, examples, and tools Janio presents can counter the challenges AI is creating in facilitating and observing authentic student learning.”

“For decades, assessment practitioners and faculty have relied on a foundational literature that taught us to articulate learning outcomes, align them with curriculum and assessment, gather meaningful evidence, and use that evidence for improvement. Those principles endure, but the conditions surrounding them have changed dramatically. Jarek Janio returns the student learning outcome itself to the center of the conversation at precisely the moment the field needs to reconsider what it means to make, and substantiate, a claim about student learning. Accessible enough to engage faculty and sufficiently provocative for experienced assessment practitioners, this book connects enduring assessment principles to contemporary questions of performance, competence, generative AI, accreditation, and public trust. Janio does not ask us to abandon what the field has learned; he asks us to examine whether the ways we have operationalized those lessons are sufficient for the world in which we now assess learning. That makes this a timely and useful book for anyone responsible for helping institutions make meaningful, defensible claims about what students know and can do.”