The Growth-Oriented Assessment for Learning Framework (GOAL)

A living framework in progress—and an invitation

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, proficiency/specifications assessment, labor-based assessment, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), 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 faculty and student 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 legacy* grading so often does, learning assessment within the GOAL Framework becomes a collaborative, reflective process that centers academic rigor, deep learning, belonging, and trust.

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

* Throughout this work, I sometimes use the term legacy grading rather than the more familiar traditional grading. While “traditional” can sound neutral or even nostalgic, “legacy” highlights how grading practices are inherited structures — passed down through educational history in ways that often preserve inequity and obscure their origins. Using “legacy” helps me signal that our current grading systems were not inevitable, but designed within particular historical, cultural, and political contexts whose values may no longer serve today’s learners or learning goals. Naming them as legacy systems invites a reckoning with both what we’ve inherited and what we might consciously reimagine.

Next: An Introduction to the GOAL Framework →