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Institutional effectiveness and accountability: improving educational quality and meeting the expect

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Title: Institutional effectiveness and accountability: improving educational quality and meeting the expect


1
Institutional effectiveness and
accountabilityimproving educational quality and
meeting the expectations of regional accreditors
Horace D. Stearman, Ph.D. Director of
Institutional Effectiveness Rocky Mountain
University of Health Professions
July 31, 2008
2
The Key Buzzwords of Higher Education in the
Twenty-First Century Institutional
Effectiveness and Accountability
  • What began in the 1980s and 1990s as a call
    within the academy for greater concern about
    enhancing student learning has become an
    increasingly strident demand that greater
    accountability be displayed by all institutions
    of higher learning.
  • This swelling tide crested in 2006 with the
    publication of the report of the Commission on
    the Future of Higher Education, a blue-ribbon
    panel charged by U.S. Secretary of Education
    Margaret Spellings with creating a comprehensive
    national strategy for postsecondary education.
  • A critical recommendation of the Spellings Report
    is an expectation that colleges and universities
    will measure student learning much more precisely
    and take action to improve it as well as the
    function of all administrative units that play a
    supportive role.
  • Heightened interest in institutional
    effectiveness now extends from the federal
    government through governors and state officials
    and into coordinating boards and boards of
    trustees and regents. The belief that colleges
    and universities should be more transparent and
    accountable to students, parents, employers,
    state officials ,and taxpayers is not confined to
    any political party and is unlikely to diminish
    in the near future.

3
Assessment is the Mechanism for Institutional
Effectiveness
  • AssessmentWorking Definition
  • Assessment is the systematic gathering and
    analyzing of information to improve student
    learning

  • (Dr. Barbara Walvoord,
    University of Notre Dame)
  • AssessmentNot Limited to Academics
  • Administrative support unitseveryone at the
    institution that is not directly involved in
    instructionshould define their mission,
    establish goals, and determine how to measure
    outcomes associated with those goals so that key
    processes that meet the needs and expectations of
    students, parents, employers, faculty and other
    stakeholders can be improved on a continuous
    basis.
  • The Administrative Unit
    Assessment Handbook
  • University of Central Florida
  • AssessmentLinking Process between Planning and
    Evaluation

4
Why Do Assessment?
  • External drivers
  • Regional and program-level accreditation criteria
  • Documentation that you have established an
    effective assessment process that leads to
    continuous improvement
  • Internal drivers
  • Good management
  • Quality motivation
  • Knowing where you are
  • Knowing where you have been
  • Knowing what is possible and how to get there
  • Standard 1.BPlanning and Effectiveness
    (Northwest Commission on Colleges and
    Universities)
  • The institution engages in ongoing planning to
    achieve its missions and goals. It also
    evaluates how well, and in what ways, it is
    accomplishing its mission and goals and uses the
    results for broadbased, continuous planning and
    evaluation. Through its planning process, the
    institution asks questions, seeks answers,
    analyzes itself, and revises its goals, policies,
    procedures, and resource allocation.

5
Levels of Assessment
  • Classroom assessment
  • Assessment of individual students performance at
    the course level by an instructor
  • Course assessment
  • Assessment of how well a course is meeting
    student learning outcomes
  • Program assessment
  • Assessment of how well an academic program is
    meeting student learning outcomes
  • Assessment of how well an educational support
    unit is meeting its objectives
  • Institutional assessment
  • Assessment of campus-wide issues or programs

6
Purposes of Program Assessment
  • To improve
  • The assessment process should provide feedback to
    determine how the program can be improved
  • To inform
  • The assessment process should inform faculty and
    other decision-makers of the contribution and
    impact of the program
  • To prove
  • The assessment process should encapsulate and
    demonstrate what the program is accomplishing to
    students, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders
  • To support
  • The assessment process should provide support for
    campus decision-making activities such as program
    review, strategic planning, and external
    accountability activities such as accreditation

7
Program Assessment for Continuous Quality
Improvement
  • is a formative evaluation process designed to
    support program improvement
  • is continuous
  • is focused on improvement
  • Student learning
  • Student development
  • The institution and its people

8
Effective Program Assessment Should Answer These
Questions
  • What are you trying to accomplish?
  • How well are you doing it?
  • How, using the answers to the first two
    questions, can you improve what you are doing?
  • What and how does a program contribute to the
    development and growth of its students and/or the
    support of its customers?
  • How can student learning be improved?

9
The Mechanics of Assessment
  • Assessment is a continuous improvement process
  • To improve, you need to know where you are today
    and where you would like to go
  • Mission (purpose)
  • Vision (where you would like to go)
  • Objectives or outcomes (what you need to achieve
    in order to get there)
  • Measures (how well you are currently doing)
  • To improve, you need to take action
  • Analyze your program or operation to determine
    needed changes
  • Plan the changes
  • Take action

10
I. Select an Assessment Model
  • Popular modelNichols 5-step approach
  • A Practitioners Handbook for Institutional
    Effectiveness and Student Outcomes Assessment
    Implementation. James O. Nichols, Agathon Press,
    1995
  • Necessary to implement a consistent process
    across the institution
  • Eliminates ambiguity
  • Makes planning easier
  • Makes training easier
  • Standardizes the documentation
  • Easier for external evaluators to examine the
    documentation
  • Helps increase the comfort level
  • Level of flexibility depends on maturity of the
    process

11
II. Implement the Assessment Model
  • Who is required to conduct assessment? Academic
    departments, academic programs, support units
  • What do you assess?
  • Four to seven outcomes that are crucial to the
    program or units success
  • When do you conduct assessment?Annually,
    quarterly, monthly, semester basis
  • How?Portfolios, surveys, institutional data,
    standardized tests

12
Assessment Plan Template for Support Unit

13
Assessment Plan Template for Academic Program

14
COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH ASSESSMENT
1. Faculty members already evaluate students
through the grades they issue in their classes.
Program assessment is redundant. Faculty
members do evaluate students routinely and assign
grades to reflect individual levels of
accomplishment on tasks, tests, and courses. But
grades reflect a variety of types of learning,
activities, bonus credits, and expectations that
vary from instructor to instructor. Assessment
requires a programs faculty to make a joint
decision about what specific learning should be
evaluated and what knowledge, skills, and
attitudes are indicative of the major learning
goals set for the program. Programmatic
assessment, unlike grades, is designed to
evaluate the level of accomplishment of a program
,not an individual student. 2. Staff members
already know about issues in processes and
procedures that they have with their users.
Assessment does not tell us anything new. Staff
members do know a lot about the issues and
problems that exist in their offices, but they
are often too close to the problems, too invested
in the processes and procedures, or just too busy
to develop solutions to the problems that they
know exist. Assessment forces staff members to
step back, examine issues and problems from a new
perspective, and rethink the activities of the
office. No unit is so perfect that examination
of issues and problems will not allow staff
members to make improvements in how the unit
functions. 3. Assessment should only be used to
demonstrate a programs or offices successes.
Assessment in instructional areas is based on
the improvement of student learning and program
success. In non-instructional offices or units,
it is based on improvement in the efficiency or
quality of services. If the program or unit has
no room for improvement, then assessment is of no
use. It follows that the areas in which
assessment should be concentrated are those in
which the greatest improvements can be made. The
reality is that every program and every office
can get better, and assessment can provide
information to inform decisions about
improvement.

15
Institution Vision/Mission
Institutional Goals/Strategies
Education
Research
Organizational Effectiveness
Community Partnerships
Diversity
Major Division Mission
Strategic Plans (Major Divisions)
Sample Goals Increase
faculty size Diversify
funding Improve internal
communication Improve external
relationships
Use of Results
Integrated Planning
Unit Assessments
Expected Outcomes/Measures
Findings Assessment/Reporting

16
  • H.D. Stearman
  • Director of Institutional Effectiveness
  • Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions
  • (801) 734-6814
  • hdstearman_at_rmuohp.edu
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