May 14, 2008
MEMO
To: Department Chairs and Program Coordinators
From: Valerie Lehr, Vice President of the University and Dean of Academic Affairs
and Kim Mooney, Special Assistant to the President for Assessment
Re: Assessment Reports
As we near the end of the year, we are pleased to report that most departments have submitted their assessment pilot project reports and they have been read and discussed by us and by the University Assessment Committee. We thought it would be worthwhile to send a few reflections on these projects to you.
Some departments chose to collect information about their goals and curricula through indirect assessment work, particularly projects focused on surveys. These departments learned some interesting facts about their alumni and about how students progress through their majors’ courses. Yet, we and the Assessment Committee saw a number of limitations to these projects. First, they are inherently limited in that they tell us about people’s perceptions of what they learned, rather than what they learned or what they are able to do as a result of that learning. Second, it is hard to design surveys so that they allow us to answer the questions that the department would like to answer. This is particularly true if they are not analyzed in a way that allows for exploration of interactions between variables. Finally, because surveys are administered on campus frequently (and we simply cannot add many more) the data that departments seek may already be available on the Institutional Research web site or through the Registrar’s Office. The Assessment Committee will continue to work on developing ways to make access to this institutional data more visible and direct.
Those of us who read all of the assessment reports agree that the projects centered around direct assessment of student work generated the clearest finding and perhaps the most substantive conversation within departments. These direct assessment projects were carried out in a number of ways, from projects that asked students to write essays specifically so they could be used in assessment, to projects that assessed SYEs (either the oral component, the written component, or both), to a project that had students take a standardized test. The success of these projects leads us to believe that direct assessment needs to be the central assessment strategy that departments pursue in the future. As a result of this insight, the two of us will assemble a collection of these project reports and send them to Chairs in the fall so that others may use them as they think about the next steps that their department will take in assessment. With this compilation, you will also receive an outline of how we see this work moving forward, something all of us will surely discuss next year.
Valerie Lehr
