The Role of the Institutional Review Board*
Every now and then, Student Life Studies’ staff gets asked, “Does this project need to go to the Institutional Review Board (IRB)? Every now and then, Student Life Studies’ staff [...]
Change is Hard
Change. It’s hard. People don’t like it. It causes disruption. It’s hard. It causes conflict. It takes too much time. It’s hard….Okay, now that we have that out of the [...]
Reflections on the Student Success in Higher Education Conference
Last month, I attended the new NASPA Student Success in Higher Education Conference. It combined four conferences in one: Closing the Achievement Gap, Student Financial Wellness, First-Generation Student Success, and [...]
Documenting Your Assessment
It’s the end of the year. Whoop! You might be taking a well-deserved breather or already in the planning mode for next year. Either way, don’t forget to document what [...]
What I Learn from Program Reviews
Recently, I was asked to review a relatively new student affairs assessment office at a different institution using the CAS Standards (https://www.cas.edu/). I have done program reviews before, and they [...]
Assessment as Counseling?
A few weeks ago, in the graduate class I teach, one of the students asked (paraphrasing) if I used counseling skills when working with people on assessment (thanks, Dylan!). I [...]
A Response to “Why Do I Assess?”
In late January, Linda Suskie, a well-known higher education assessment author and consultant, published a blog post, “Why Do I Assess?” Not only did the post garner comments on her [...]
Assessing Everything All the Time
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 [...]
Extracurricular vs. Co-curricular
Language is important. We can all agree on that, right? It helps us communicate meaning so we understand each other. In higher education, we create our own jargon, slang , [...]
Increasing Response Rates
One of the most common questions we get in Student Life Studies is how to increase response rate, especially for electronic surveys. Students are over-surveyed, so just because you can [...]