Some Practical Advice

to Make Assessment Meaningful

 

 

1.     Plan to assess all your program’s academic goals over a brief (1 to 3 years) period of time;

 

2.     Don’t try to assess everything all at once;

 

3.     If you get the same results with repeated assessments, you need not keep assessing the same item for several years;

 

4.     Use both direct and indirect methods of assessment;

 

5.     Use methods that faculty in your discipline are familiar with: e.g., if your discipline does not use tight statistical designs,  descriptive studies may be appropriate;

 

6.     If you have some key concerns or questions about your program, focus your major assessment efforts upon those;

 

a.    What is most important to find out?

b.   What do you really want to learn?

 

7.     Build your assessment plan to provide the best data that your department can use, not simply to satisfy an accreditation or administrative requirement;

 

8.  Assessment plans will evolve over time:  if something doesn’t work or new questions arise after an assessment, change the plan;

 

9.   Encourage some faculty to use assessment research for their scholarship.