Last week I was asked to present to the Cocurricular Learning Group on "assessment in student affairs" at Penn State. Certainly no small assignment for a newbie, but thinking about what I would like to say to this particular group on this topic gave me a chance to reflect on what I've observed in my five short months as the director of Student Affairs Research and Assessment.
So, let's start with the data. It is clear that Student Affairs staff members are providing a diverse and growing number of programs for Penn State students and we are spending more time assessing these programs. In the first half of 2009-11, Student Affairs offered approximately the same number of programs and conducted almost twice as many assessments as it did in the entire 2005-06 academic year (data from the Educational Programming Record). Assessment data being collected includes participation numbers, survey data, formal and informal feedback and document analysis (student journals, reflections, etc.)
And yet, despite this flurry of assessment activity, we still have a very hard time "telling our story" to the university community. It appears to me that part of the problem is that the data doesn't make it up the pipeline. While staff members may use the data to improve their programs, the data is not being aggregated or disseminated at a level that allows us to promote our positive impacts on student learning and development.
Many units are making great strides in developing their own unit-level outcomes and assessing their activities based on these outcomes. My hope that is that as SARA moves forward in the coming years, we can increase the educational opportunities we provide to Student Affairs staff. In doing so, we can build our assessment capacity in the units, allowing SARA to play a greater role in integrating data from across the Division. Then we can shout our successes from the rooftops and back them up with data.
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