Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

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Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

8/30/2006

By Matt Villano

Institutional Assessment The University of Central Florida is also tackling institutional assessment on its own. Under a relatively recent mandate, approximately 200 academic programs and 100 administrative units are involved in conducting web-based assessment on a yearly basis. The process includes annual submission of a homecooked assessment report which contains the results of the previous year’s assessment, proposed or actual changes based on those results, and a new assessment plan to measure the impact of the changes. Julia Pet-Armacost, assistant VP for information, analysis, and assessment, says the system has worked wonders for institutional effectiveness.

“We’re certainly thinking in ways we weren’t able to think before,” she reports enthusiastically. “When you’re running an institution, just this kind of thinking alone can be priceless.”

The Hybrid Approach

At the University of California-Davis, home-baked assessment applications have taken on a new flavor. To monitor the status of faculty grant proposals from conception to completion and approval, the school has customized its own version of an electronic research administration system from Inf'Ed International, says Doug Hartline, director of technology planning and development. Hartline says the school is in the early stages of a 25-month rollout, but notes that when the solution is complete, resulting processes should save significant time and money over the old method of submitting, tracking, and finalizing grant applications by hand.

“We’re weaving functions together in order to make our entire environment more efficient,” he says. “Over time, as the volume of our work increases, we can take the resources we save and dedicate them to performing other functions.”

Western Washington University, too, is combining an off-the-shelf solution with one developed in-house. There, school officials have combined backend student, financial aid, human resources, and advancement systems from SunGard Higher Education with a brand-new series of web-based Qualitative Symbolic Reasoning (QSR) tests, to dig even deeper into data at hand. The assessments are part of an effort dubbed the Western Educational Longitudinal Survey, or WELS, and they seek to ask students in-depth questions about their present experiences so that officials can develop a richer picture of how the everyday is affecting their development.

Karen Castro, associate director of WWU’s Center for Instructional Innovation, explains that the effort is designed to coordinate information that isn’t easily captured by the SunGard product. After years of utilizing national instruments such as the Cooperative Institutional Research Program and the College Student Experiences Questionnaire, Castro devised the system as a less expensive alternative. Rich Frye, research analyst for the Office of Institutional Assessment and Testing, says the one-two punch of SunGard and WELS has proven to be an unbeatable resource, giving WWU more data than administrators there had ever dreamed possible.

“We distribute information to both academic and non-academic programs, and those programs are getting information they have never had before,” he says. “We believe that the better the data we develop and provide, the better the student experience will become.”