Response to the Fall 2017 Report to the HLC Assessment Academy

Margaret (Peggy) L. Bloom, margaret.bloom@marquette.edu, (414) 540-0478

HLC Scholar:

Jan Smith, jsmith@pittstate.edu

This project continues to gain many strengths as it unfolds! It is a pleasure to follow your work! The strengths I particularly noted this time are:

1. The Project Team is a distinct strength. The continuity of the project team membership, the obvious long-term commitment of the project team members, and the team’s openness to and use of suggestions and feedback are the “backbone” and “super glue” for success.

2.  Involvement of the entire university community has been achieved by face to face meetings and planned communications, e.g., Trustee reports, engagement of the cocurricular units who now have an assessment team, interaction with student government, and faculty development for all faculty on assessment topics.

3.  All three levels of assessment, course, program, and institutional, are being implemented with 3 of the 5 ELO’s done and assessed once, courses nearing 80% with a student learning chart and all academic programs have learning outcomes and completed one assessment cycle for at least two of their five learning outcomes.

4. Top leadership commitment in respect to budget allocations is now evident in the creation of the Director of Evaluation position, in continuing to fund project team participation in assessment conferences, and the Spring 2017 assessment awards.

5. You are beginning to learn how to set appropriate boundaries so assessment can move from development to action. For example, the team limited program learning outcomes to five for each program and decided it was time to cast ELO’s “in plaster if not stone” (smile!).

Reviewed by Jan Smith (HLC Scholar):

Once more, I fully agree with Peggy’s observations. I especially note your team as a strength and would add level of engagement and commitment in addition to continuity and openness to feedback. You are doing a great job of maintaining momentum and keeping the project moving forward. I love that your ELO’s are now “in plaster” and keeping things manageable at the program level will be much appreciated by faculty and will serve you well in terms of increasing the likelihood of meaningful assessment rather than simply compliance with requests.

As your Assessment Project progresses I am thinking about issues of integration, structure, and sustainability.

1. You note that “now we have some experience with the first three measures we can develop the [ELO assessment] plan in greater detail.” What exactly did you learn that you will build on? What did you discover did not work? Can you be more specific about the type of measures and forms of data analysis that seem most useful for your essential learning outcomes?

2. Regarding your plans to increase the sharing of assessment information, in addition to providing resources for conducting assessment you will need to share outcome information. How will you share program and institutional outcome data to relevant stakeholders such as faculty, students and prospective students?

3. The involvement of the cocurricular units is off to a good start. How will their outcome data contribute to or be integrated within the institutional learning (ELO’s) outcome data?

4. Forgive me if you stated this in an earlier project report and I missed it but,  are the ELO’s across the board for your master’s and doctoral programs as well as undergraduate or are the ELO’s just for undergraduates? How are graduate students being assessed in respect to Maharishi U of Management learning outcomes?

5. How will the new Director of Assessment work with the project team for the second half of the project?

Reviewed by Jan Smith (HLC Scholar):

Peggy asks some great questions. Several of these questions indicate a shift in the development of your project, with focus now shifting more to meaningful use of data. If you have not already given consideration to questions regarding how you will most effectively do so, now would be a good time to do so, otherwise you risk having great data and not being able to use it to the fullest.

The project report states some important concerns for the next 6 months such as completing the assessment plan for the essential learning outcomes, developing the assessment information hub, and identifying the details for the project plan completion.  It will be important in the next 6 months to set aside time to determine where you stand the original scope of the project, i.e.,  see what parts of the project plan are in the development phase, what are in the action/implementation phase and what has been completed. This will give you a realistic idea of what lies ahead to meet the original goals by the end of the project and/or decide if other actions need to be added to meet these goals.

Given that one of the issues that brought the team to the Assessment Academy was past assessment efforts quickly fizzling in a year or two, the team definitely needs a careful look at how each element of your assessment process will be sustained. Consider making this topic a focus of the project team’s professional development this coming year.  Think about how to sustain assessment beyond any one person or set of individual’s such as the project team or the new Director of Evaluation.  That usually requires having a permanent organizational structure (organizational chart) for assessment at the university so it is clear who is responsible to makes sure assessment is ongoing and assessment data used to improve student learning. It is  also important to formalize what you have developed such as having formal assessment policies and guidelines written and then approved by faculty governance, university leadership and trustees which detail student learning assessment requirements at MUM, the assessment process, how it will be used in planning, etc.

Reviewed by Jan Smith (HLC Scholar):

Peggy gives some excellent suggestions for you to think about. Following on from my previous comment, as you take stock of where you are at, you are now at the point where your hard work can pay off and I encourage you to pay particular attention to how you can use data to improve student learning. You are already thinking about this, but meaningful impact of assessment efforts will contribute to long-term sustainability. Also, as you think about Peggy’s suggestion of taking stock of where you are at, don’t be afraid to make any changes to your original plan if you think this would be helpful. You are doing great but many institutions make use of lessons learned at this point in the Academy to do some fine tuning of their original plan.

Have you looked at the website of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment? They have quite a library of NILOA publications (reports, papers, etc.) that seem relevant to where you are in your project. Browse!

One of their papers is on the Wabash National Study to improve assessment at small liberal arts colleges which share some of the same mission driven aspects that you have at Maharishi. I was an assessment scholar with that project.  Blaich, C. F., & Wise, K. S. (2011, January). From gathering to using assessment results: Lessons from the Wabash National Study (NILOA Occasional Paper No.8). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. http://learningoutcomesassessment.org/documents/Wabash_001.pdf

Reviewed by Jan Smith (HLC Scholar):

NILOA has some great resources and Peggy’s specific suggestion is very appropriate for where you are at in your project.