A student affairs assessment colleague at another institution recently reached out to me with a challenge at her institution. Her problem is not lack of staff motivation to assess, it’s actually the opposite. They are trying to assess every activity all the time, particularly using surveys as the data collection method. Of course, that has led to survey fatigue, a common ailment when staff catch the assessment bug.
It’s not uncommon for the pendulum to swing from no assessment, or outright antipathy about it, to assessing every…single…thing…all…of…the…time. But, not only is that unnecessary, it leads to some unintended consequences, including participant fatigue, staff fatigue, information overload, inability to make a decision or changing direction too frequently, and lack of focus on what’s truly important. How do you overcome that? Here are a few suggestions.
–Focus on what’s important to the program, the unit, the department, the division, and the institution. The alignment is important and helps you understand how what you do fits into the larger context. What are the goals and strategic plans that guide practice? If your program or services do not align with guiding documents, you might need to assess if you should be doing it at all.
–Develop and revisit outcomes frequently. Similar to aligning within the organizational structure above, looking at the outcomes helps you stay internally focused on what is important. If you have developed student learning outcomes, how will you know students have actually learned what you wanted them to learn? If you are assessing program or process outcomes, how are you keeping track of those to know you are effective in your practice?
–Vary your assessment methods. Surveys are overused in the student affairs assessment. Perhaps you have the ability to set up focus groups or interviews as a follow up to survey responses or you focus on individual experiences and perceptions. If you are promoting student learning with a small group, you could create rubrics for self and other evaluation. For longer term, deeper experiences, participants could journal or reflect on photos they have taken.
–Create a calendar for both short term and long terms assessment practices. In the short term, look at the number of programs/activities you do, the academic calendar, and planning and reporting timelines. If you present a canned program 10 times a semester, do you really need to assess it 10 times, or can you take a sample of them? Maybe you pick every second or third program in the first semester to determine what changes need to be made for the following semester. If you are looking at usage of services, maybe you pick one or two “typical” weeks in a semester to review, rather than 15 weeks. In the long run, you can create a calendar of important topics you want to know about and how you plan to assess them. Maybe one year focuses on satisfaction (using a survey), while the next year focuses on student learning (using rubrics or exit interviews), and the year after that focuses on tracking usage (using observation and preexisting data). You assessment will be ongoing, but will also give you focus areas of improvement each year.
–Be brief. See my previous blog, “You Only Get Five Questions.” People are much more likely to respond to a few quick questions than a long, involved survey. Focus on what your NEED to know, not what you just want to know. Besides, you can’t address 100 things in a year, so you don’t need to ask 100 questions on a survey. Moreover, if you have asked the same questions for several iterations, the answers have been (acceptably) consistent, and you have no plans to change that area, STOP asking it about it for a while. You already know the answer.
–If you haven’t used past data for change, don’t reassess yet. Why would you think the answer would be any different? Change and improvement take time to implement, especially for large scale changes. Keston Fulcher and his colleagues at James Madison University, wrote a great article, “A Model for Learning Improvement: Weigh Pig, Feed Pig, Weigh Pig.” If you assess something (weigh pig) without taking action (feed pig) before assessing again (weigh pig), you will likely get the same results. You can assess too frequently, which becomes a waste of time and resources, for both you and the participants.
I hope this gives you some ideas about just saying no to over assessing. You need time to do the great things you do for students and staff; you don’t need to assess everything all the time. Take that advice from someone who loves assessment and works with staff to do it well every day!