Supporting the Student Experience: Building an Effective Assessment Process for Administrative Units
Thursday, April 4, 2013
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm - Eastern Time
Jennifer Gray
Director, Assessment & Support
WEAVE
If you are similar to most institutions, you have been focusing efforts in complying with student learning assessment, in-classroom learning specifically. Therefore, it is incumbent upon student and institutional support areas to assess their out-of-class contributions to the student experience. These units provide significant support to the institution’s overall mission and goals and it is imperative that they evaluate progress in those activities.
This webinar will include information about practical and effective ways for non-instructional units to build goals, outcomes and measures that may not deal directly with student learning. Participants will be provided with specific examples of evaluation tools used to assess non-instructional units such as; Residential Life, Dining Services, Admissions, Tutoring Services, Facilities & Grounds and Payroll.
Administrative assessment is a term that has been used to refer to things as broad and far-reaching as strategic planning and budgeting, and as specifically functional as Dining Hall Services. The process of assessing achievement in these concepts is the same; however the goals, outcomes, measures, findings and action plans will vary significantly. This webinar will focus on process assessment within student support and other institutional support areas.
Some of these non-instructional units will have been blissfully ignorant of the assessment functions at your institution, thinking that it was something only teaching faculty had to worry about. They will, hopefully, have been involved in higher level assessment and planning. As assessment coordinators or supporters, after focusing so much attention on Blooms Taxonomy terms (demonstrate, define, describe, etc), the real difficulty will be helping these units to write outcomes that will be measurable based on their functional processes. They will mostly likely involve activity and satisfaction levels (# of students, # of incidents, % of events, etc) rather than physical behavior that can be measured in a classroom.
About the Presenter:
Jennifer comes to WEAVE from the State University of New York, College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill, where she was the Director of Institutional Effectiveness. She was responsible for coordinating all assessment processes, working with both academic and non-instructional/administrative units. Jennifer worked with faculty and staff to research and ultimately purchase the Weave app for assessment and planning on campus. She was responsible for all Weave support, updates and training. Jennifer created and facilitated annual Assessment Day conferences on campus. Jennifer worked with College administration on Middle States Commission on Higher Education accreditation, and co-chaired the institution’s 2011 decennial Self-Study process. Jennifer worked with faculty and staff to update the academic program review process and align it clearly with the overall assessment process on campus. She was also responsible for all institutional research on campus.
