Collaborative Assessment: A Strategy to Relate, Reflect, and ReactLeah Barrett, Assistant Vice President, Student Affairs Matt Barone, Assistant Director, Campus LifeJosh Fegley, Assistant Director, Health Promotion & Prevention ServicesSara Kelly, Assistant Director, Residential Life/Learning Communities

Session OutcomesParticipants will identify elements that contribute to the development and maintenance of a collaborative culture of assessment.

Participants will describe a model for mapping student learning within individual departments and throughout a division, including the development of a divisional assessment team.

Participants will describe the cycle of assessment and how results are used to enhance student learning and development.

What do you hope to learn today?

A Culture of Evidence Defining a Culture of Evidence A culture wherein indicators of performance are regularly developed and data collected to inform decision-making, planning, and improvement.

National Higher Education Benchmarking Institute

How do you know you are working within a Culture of Evidence?

A Culture of Evidence Defining a Evidence Institutional CommitmentContinuous Process Closing the LoopFocus on Student SuccessStakeholder InvolvementCumulative & CollaborativeCulture of Evidence

A Culture of Evidence Characteristics of Good Evidence RelevantVerifiableRepresentative CumulativeActionable Collaborative!

A Culture of Evidence Principles of Good Assessment (Astin & Banta)The assessment of student learning begins with educational values

Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and occurring over time.

A Culture of Evidence Student Learning Interconnectedness of Student LearningLearning Reconsidered, 2004

A Culture of Evidence Principles of Good Assessment (Astin & Banta)Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clearly stated purposes.

Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes.

Assessment works best when it is ongoing, not episodic.

A Culture of Evidence Principles of Good Assessment (Astin & Banta)Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved.

Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about.

Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change.

Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public.

A Culture of Evidence Defining a Evidence Institutional CommitmentContinuous Process Closing the LoopFocus on Student SuccessStakeholder InvolvementCumulative & CollaborativeCulture of Evidence

Brockports Assessment Revolution2007VPSA What are we doing with assessment?2009First Workshop on SLOs1st version of EATLearning Reconsidered 2010- 20122nd version of EAT & Steering Committee

Creating Buy-In

Leadership from the topAttend national conferencesNASPA Assessment & Persistence ConferenceAssessment InstituteRead, attend workshops, discuss & repeatInvolvement by each departmentAccountability performance planning

Foundational StructureEnrollment Management & Student Affairs Assessment Team Guiding literatureLearning ReconsideredAssessment Reconsidered Student Success in College by Kuh Various scholarly articlesStructure & FunctionsProfessional Development & TrainingOutreach Marketing & CommunicationData Analysis TK20

Engaging Every Department Positively persistent approach to meaningful, inclusive assessmentA journey, not a destinationProgrammatic and learning outcomes process Improvement oriented approachEMSA Assessment WebsiteStrategic plan exampleLearning outcomes for different departments and programsBriefing Book Closing the loopProfessional development schedule

Departmental Assessment ProgramsCampus LifeHealth Promotions/Prevention ServicesResidential Life/Learning Communities

A cycle of assessmentAdapted from The Center for Assessment and Research Studies at James Madison University.

Reflect and React What: Explain the outcomes of the program and the ways in which you collected the data.So What: Discuss results with your team to determine what the data is telling you.Now What: Explain how you will use this information in the future.

Closing the Loop Documents

Lessons Learned & AccomplishmentsEAT WebsiteTraining and development is continuousProgrammatic learning outcomesDepartmental learning outcomesTrained students in focus group facilitationShared data across the divisionAdministered more surveys, documented more observations, analyzed more resultsStopped using some survey toolsClosing the loop documentsMiddle States Accreditation Proposals for conferencestelling our story

DiscussionWhere are you in your process?What challenges exist?Who is involved in your program/assessment processes for your division/department? What assessment tools do you use?How do you use and share assessment data? Anything youd like to discuss!

Wicked Awesome Ideas!How will what you have learned during this session contribute to your personal development, professional development, or both?

As a result of your attendance at this educational session, what question(s) do you have that is important for the profession to further examine?

Please identify one wicked awesome idea that you will take with you and try to implement immediately in your jobs or to further discuss with colleagues at your home institution.

Questions/Comments

Leah Barrett, lbarrett@brockport.eduMatt Barone, mbarone@brockport.eduJosh Fegley, jfegley@brockport.eduSara Kelly, skelly@brockport.edu

Upcoming Opportunities Western New York Enrollment Management & Student Affairs Assessment Consortium, June 18th at Rochester Institute of TechnologyNASPA Assessment & Persistence Conference, June 7-9 in TampaAssessment Institute in Indianapolis October 28 - 30, 2012

Data can be focused on student persistence, student learning, institutional performance, and student behaviors Data and evidence cannot do anything by themselves reflection and action are necessary

*Unpacking the institutional contextSolving practical problems The practitioner and the institution learn ******Unpacking the institutional contextSolving practical problems The practitioner and the institution learn *Introductions here.**Resources shared to all in leadership positions: LR2, Student Success in College and Assessment Reconsidered

Structure & FunctionsProfessional Development & TrainingEquipping all departments with the content education and tools to coordinate assessment on various levels. Focus on how we can help departments find ways to integrate assessment and provide resources to adapt and reflect on their assessment processes (assessment inventory, to sample rubrics, workshops on survey design, national surveys, data analysis, etc)Coordinate scholarly article review at every team meeting Outreach Provide point people in the division for those that have questions, need individual attention or consultation which compliments the learning process. Added support Marketing & CommunicationCommunicates our goals and data driven decisions Sharing resources in our Angel group and onlineCoordinating our briefing book, annual report and other reporting methodsData Analysis Highlights existing data to the team to familiarize the group with data that already exists that might be useful for each department in the division, at every team meeting Examples include NSSE, SOS, Transfer Study of Excellence, etc TK20Assessment software system that our institution is usingIt links larger goals and priorities to departmental and programmatic outcomes as well as strategies Its a way or organizing data in a web for the institution

*Positively persistent approach to meaningful, inclusive assessmentWe understand that assessment isnt a cookie cutter process with pretty packaged surveys getting all of the information we want. Each department has different needs and approaches so we help departments develop their own assessment programs that might not be identical. Departments are at different points and comfort levels with assessment.

With that being said, we started this process by asking every department to develop learning outcomes- some found it easier to develop them for a specific program like Homecoming Weekend while others looked at the larger picture of their whole department: What impact do we hope to make on students?

Later, we asked departments to develop programmatic and learning outcomes for each of their areas. Programmatic outcomes focus on some of the outcomes that dont fall into the student learning category like number of visits to the union while the learning component may be related to learning what student services are available in the union. For Res Life, a programmatic outcome will be related to occupancy numbers while a learning outcome will be related to students learning conflict resolution skills.

Then we asked ourselves, how are we successful? What are our measures of success? This led us to focus our conversation more on benchmarks, goals, strategic planning, etc.

Ultimately, we encourage an improvement oriented approach to assessment- collecting and using data to improve the student experience, related to learning, satisfaction and engagement

Share the websiteStrategic plan for the divisionLearning outcomes for different departments and programsBriefing Book Closing the loopProfessional development schedule

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