Student Affairs Assessment Resources

Providing support, guidance, direction, and coordination for assessment efforts across the division of Student Affairs; inspiring and assisting units and individuals in their pursuit of standards of excellence.

What you 'll find: Basic definitions, tips, templates, and guidelines for getting started or enhancing existing assessment efforts.

Definitions

Assessment: Any mechanism for systematically collecting, evaluating, and interpreting information about your programs or services.

Evaluation: Particular assessment efforts aimed at measuring a current program, service, or process against an established goal or objective. Evaluation efforts take three primary forms:

• Frequency  - how many people use the program or service?
• Satisfaction - did the users like the program or service?  Were their hopes met?
• Outcome - what effect/correlation can be drawn between the program or service and the user's behavior or development?  If the program aims to change attitudes, experiences or behaviors, at least some of your evaluation questions should fall into this category.

Tips

Your assessment efforts will be most valuable, and least painful if:

1. Mechanisms for evaluation are built-in to your strategic planning processes. In addition to "what if" and "where do we want to go" conversations, be sure you are regularly having "how will we know if we are successful" conversations.
   
   
2. You bridge the assessment-adjustment divide in regular one-on-one and team conversations. Meetings should regularly include conversations about how you are faring at meeting your strategic goals and objectives, and discussions of how to adjust and adapt if you aren't as successful as you want to be. Provide resources and support to enable people to make adjustments based on what your evaluation efforts are telling you.
   
   
3. Managers and supervisors use assessment to reward, celebrate, and support rather than to chastise, punish, or dismantle. People generally want to be successful and do good work. The greatest fear associated with assessment is the fear of "failure" or creating the perception they are not doing good work. Use assessment to recognize when and how goals and objectives ARE being met and people will naturally make adjustments in low-performing areas to achieve greater success.
   
   
4. Reframe "failures" as opportunities for creativity, deeper learning, and magnified success. If assessment is used to single out "failures" and resources are at risk, people may shy away from assessing things they aren't very good at. This diminishes the value of an assessment program--it is good to know where your strenghts are, but the greatest sucesses come from understanding how to learn from challenges, pitfalls, and yes, failures. Not assessing those areas of struggle doesn't make them go away. In fact it can make them grow and fester because we have made them invisible, taboo, and removed opportunities to learn from them. In your regular conversations about evaluation, treat weaknesses and pitfalls with curiosity: instead of asking "what's wrong here and how can we make it better?" or (even worse) "why aren't you working harder or doing a better job?" ask "what does this challenge have to teach us?" and "how can what we'll learn from this make us even more successful?"
   
   
5. Treat people at all levels of the organization as key collaborators in building a good program of evaluation and assessment. Leadership may need to provide the broad vision and direction, but it is people on the front lines of your program or service delivery that likely have the most insight into where things are breaking down and where systems and processes don't support accomplishing your goals and objectives.
   
   
6. Keep your efforts manageable. You may have many goals and objectives and many things you are trying to accomplish at once. You should, however, identify 1-3 key goals that will make the biggest impact or most marked improvement in accomplishing your overall vision. Focus your assessment efforts on these areas. This does not mean you should ignore everything else, but it does mean that if things get busy and something has to give, other things give before those 1-3 primary objectives. A clear focus on those items will allow all members of your organization to maximize their contribution to moving the unit in the area you have deemed most important.
   
   
7. Know what you will use the data for and make the feedback cycle visible. Nothing kills an assessment effort faster than people feeling like they spent a lot of time and effort collecting information only to have their report sit on a desk or shelf and collect dust. Don't undertake assessment and evaluation efforts if you are not committed to acting on the data you collect. Be sure that all key stakeholders and people who participated in providing feedback to your evaluation process are made aware of how the data they helped you gather have impacted key decisions going forward. If people feel their contribution had a valuable impact they are more likely to entusiastically support your next round of assessment efforts.
   
   
8. Assessment never ends. This doesn't mean you never take a break or stop to celebrate successes at the end of a big project, but if the value of assessment is in helping you to see your programs and services in a new light, and make better decisions, the results of one project should always contain the seeds of questions for the next project. If assessment is cyclical and habitual it will both be more valuable and feel less onerous.

Templates

Use the templates below to create your assessment reports and to stimulate conversation about your assessment and evaluation efforts. More than a standardized form for recording progress, these documents provide a framework for conversation. If you can talk through the template and answer all its questions or complete all of its sections you will be well on your way to a successful and substantive assessment program.

The "department level" template is appropriate for use in all departments. The audience for this document is the director, the Student Affairs Assessment Coordinator, and the Vice Chancellor and Associate Vice Chancellors. It may form the basis of the contents for your assessment component in your annual report.

The "unit level" template is intended for larger departments with sub-"units" or different functional areas and will allow individual units to easily contribute to the department level document or conversation. The audience for this document is the director and assistant/associate directors of different functional areas.

Guidelines

Dowload these 10 steps for performing assessment

If you don't find something you think would be helpful in your assessment efforts here, please contact us using the link below. This site will only be as good as your valuable feedback makes it.