Getting the Ball Rolling: Beginning an Assessment Program on Your Campus

While this article by Catherine Wehlburg, senior associate of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Assessment Forum, discusses developing outcomes assessment programs campus-wide, the principles are easily applicable to school or department/program level assessment.

You knew it was coming, you just did not want to think about it. Or, when you did think about it, you convinced yourself that it was just a fad. But finally the letter or phone call came and you knew it had to be done. The assessment process is often put off until the last possible moment, and then it can become a heavy and externally mandated load.

This article is not about the “best” way to approach the assessment of student learning, or even about the most up-to-date and sophisticated methods of implementing an assessment program. Instead, this article is designed to help you take the initial steps toward a campus culture that benefits from a meaningful assessment program, even when you need assessment information quickly under external mandate.

Getting to Assessment
It seems that assessment is not always the most popular topic among faculty members. Ralph Wolff and Olita Harris, writing in Changing College Classrooms: New Teaching and Learning Strategies for an Increasingly Complex World (1994), describe stages through which an institution typically goes when addressing the (usually) mandated need for assessment. These stages are loosely based on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on the stages of death and dying.

The first stage, typically, is denial. Often, faculty (and administrators) have vague feelings of uneasiness in this first stage and struggle to maintain status quo. Faculty may picture assessment as the next higher education fad that will soon pass.

Once an institution accepts assessment as something that will have to be done, that institution hits the second stage—resistance. Here, individuals see assessment as a threat to their department, course, or college. As part of this stage, some efforts are made toward an assessment plan, but these efforts are usually made by a small committee and are not seen as important by the entire campus.

The third stage, understanding, shows a campus making efforts to define an assessment plan specific to the needs of that campus. Normally, this is where a census is taken of existing efforts, such as data collection and any ongoing assessment of student learning and student satisfaction.

In the fourth stage, campaign, assessment principles and guidelines are further defined and the institution is well on its way to a working assessment plan.

In collaboration, the fifth stage, specific and long-range objectives are clearly defined and assessment is widely supported as a useful tool.

Finally, in institutionalization, assessment becomes a permanent part of the cycle of the institution, and refinement of the assessment process is occurring.

Start Small
To assess student learning outcomes is a complex process. But it does not need to start out that way. The first year or two of institution-wide assessment should begin modestly so that the information collected can help to define and refresh accomplishments.

• Start simple. Choose a limited number of outcomes to measure at first. You can always add more later.
• Carefully define your student learning outcomes. If you do not know what you are looking to find, you will have a difficult time measuring it.
• Discuss how the results of the assessment program will be disseminated and used. If faculty and administrators can agree on how the information will be used, there will be fewer problems later.

Apply the Process
Putting an assessment process together is simple. It is the application of this process that can get complex and can appear almost insurmountable if too much is asked of faculty members without their understanding the process.

Decide what your institution needs to find out about student learning and what information is required by your regional accreditation association or state board of education. This can be done in several ways, but it usually involves a committee that is assigned the task of developing the assessment plan. This committee must carefully decide what the assessment plan should include. Start simple and start with the mission statement. This discussion will be one of the most frustrating and fruitful. When I go to an institution and work with faculty and administrators, I give them a copy of their own mission statement and ask them to imagine a perfect graduate. What values does that graduate hold? What skills can that student demonstrate? What materials are in that student’s portfolio?

You can always add areas. Resist the urge to begin with a list of questionnaires or surveys. At this first stage, just discuss what you want to know. For example:

• What does the mission statement indicate are important outcomes?
• What should a graduate of this institution know?
• What specific skills should a graduate of this institution have?

Begin by brainstorming a list of desirable student outcomes. Share this list widely on your campus and ask for additional items. Not everyone has to agree—the purpose is to give your committee a starting point for discussion.

Go through the list of outcomes generated and decide which items are likely to be agreed upon by a majority of individuals on your campus. To do this, you need input from the campus community. Go to faculty meetings, board of trustee meetings, student senate meetings, and any others that are appropriate to your campus. Keep in mind that it is much better to start with a few outcomes upon which everyone can agree, rather than waste a great deal of time and energy arguing over those that are not as universal. Remember, you can always add to your list of outcomes. Do not worry if the list appears to be limited and superficial. It is a start, and you can keep the momentum going more easily with concrete outcomes.

Develop (or find) at least one way to measure each of the outcomes that were agreed upon by your campus. If possible, develop more than one way to measure each outcome. Think of this step as a way of discovering what sources of data already exist on your campus. No one wants additional work, so it is important to use what your campus already has. Some of these existing data will have direct application. Maybe your alumni office has years of alumni surveys, for example, or the dean of students has reams of information on your incoming freshman class. Sometimes all it takes is the addition of a few questions to an existing survey, such as asking for alumni job titles on the annual questionnaire. This way there is no additional cost to the institution. This piggybacking technique can be a great way to incorporate some aspects of an assessment plan into the cycle of the campus without large additional costs. What about campus writing programs? Are there courses all students take as freshmen?

Not all assessment instruments are surveys, of course. Some efforts will be new or completely revised. For example, perhaps your institution would like to use portfolio assessment to judge student knowledge in general education. This may be something new to your campus. But there may be someone on your campus (in the art department, for example) who has been using portfolios for decades. That person could be very important on an assessment committee.

Standardized tests and other published instruments may also be a way for your campus to gain information on the learning outcomes of your students. Keep in mind that multiple measures of an objective will give you a greater understanding of the data you collect.

Implement your plan. Begin to measure the outcomes upon which your institution has agreed. This is very important because if the first implementation phase does not work well, some individuals on your campus may feel that assessment will not be a helpful tool for the future or, worse, that they have wasted their time working with the assessment committee. Suppose your campus has decided to use a portfolio to assess general-education learning outcomes and you want to begin collecting information for that portfolio in the first semester of the first year. This means that you will need to have the details of this plan in place before the students come to campus for their orientation. Do not try to rush the implementation just to do it. You are gathering information that has the potential to cause curricular change.

Assess the assessment plan. By assessing what occurred after the first implementation, your institution will be able to make the corrections that will make future assessment more helpful. For example, on one midwestern campus the first year of the assessment plan went relatively well, but there were additional items on which the campus community wanted more data. The assessment office saw that this could be an opportunity to embed the assessmentprocess more deeply in campus life. Because the individual department chairs wanted more data, they became involved in the process and advocated for the assessment plan.

Assessment can be viewed as a circle (see diagram on previous page). Assessment activities can measure specific goals to be met by the curriculum. On the basis of the assessment, curriculum changes may be made. Student learning may change because of the curriculum changes, and then the student learning is again assessed, and the circle continues.

Effective Plans
To be workable, effective, and meaningful, an assessment plan should have the following characteristics:

• An effective assessment plan should flow from the mission statement and should influence the curriculum and the campus life. In other words, assessment should be an ongoing process that interacts with the existing curriculum. Remember the circle concept!
• Faculty, administrators, staff, and students (both current and former) should be involved in the assessment process in some way. This is the only way to gain a broad acceptance of the commitment to assessment. Not everyone needs to be on the assessment committee, but individual departments can be intimately involved in developing outcomes for their department, and student services individuals can work on the outcomes of their areas. The assessment committee can then work as the facilitator rather than as the creator and owner of the assessment process.
• Data-collection devices already in use should be incorporated into the plan. This potentially lessens the work necessary to create new assessment instruments and includes more of the campus community.
• The assessment plan should lead to the process of improvement. Assessment is not a task to complete or a hoop through which to jump.
• Finally, the plan should include a process for assessing itself. This allows for the continuous development of the campus and the curriculum and provides the campus community with a process for making true and meaningful changes. Make sure that the data resulting from the assessment process are used appropriately and disseminated to those who can take action.

Assessment works best if the process is begun at the grass-roots level on a campus, but mandate by a regional accreditation association or a state governmental agency can get the ball rolling. Regardless of the impetus, by taking hold of the assessment process and making it work for your individual campus, you will be able to improve the quality of learning for current and future students.

Wehlburg, C. (1999). How to get the ball rolling: Beginning an assessment program on your campus. AAHE Bulletin, 51 (9), 7–9.