Using and Sharing Assessment Results

Assessment specialists and accreditors agree that doing assessment is simply not enough.  Sharing and using assessment results are probably the most important part of the assessment process—and, as numerous assessment specialists testify, the most challenging.

A great example of how to use assessment results is from the Department of Business and Economics.  

This department completed a carefully planned assessment during New Student Orientation. Included in this plan was how to use the results.  Business faculty modified the learning objectives they were given from the Office of Student Success for the Faculty Session and created a lively presentation focused on belonging to an academic community and developing strategies for success within this community. At the start of the session, the faculty polled the 39 majors in attendance about what they thought was most important to their academic success.  At the presentation’s close, they asked participants to identify which of those areas they feel they need the most help developing.

In a series of dynamic emails the following week, faculty discussed their interpretations of the poll findings.  The results and the analysis of results were then shared with the UCC 101 faculty to be used in lesson planning.

What makes this example meritorious is that the faculty planned the assessment by giving advance thought to how they would use the results.  Jillian Kinzie, Pat Hutchings, and Natasha Jankowski assert, “Institutions that effectively use assessment results focus sharply from the beginning of any assessment initiative on how results will be used” (Kuh 61, emphasis added).  

Sharing assessment results via evidence-based storytelling helps institutions communicate results that are meaningful to external audiences.  An added benefit is that audiences are spared from being overwhelmed by mind-numbing data and copious bullet points. It's a great assessment strategy for small departments that have few majors.

An excellent example of using assessment results to tell a story comes from the Department of Athletics.  The athletics staff used multiple methods, direct and indirect, to measure the impact of community engagement on student athletes.  The information was shared by the student athletes themselves in a video that highlights the value of community engagement as an educational goal for sports teams.  This video  (https://ucpioneers.com/sports/2019/9/6/pioneers-in-the-community.aspx) is posted on the Utica Pioneers webpage and accessible to external audiences, including prospective students.    

Simply reporting assessment findings sometimes amounts to little more than bean counting.  Assessment becomes a more meaningful enterprise when results are used to improve educational effectiveness and shared to tell our story.

Works Cited

George Kuh, et al. Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education. San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 2015. 51-72.

Crossing the Rubricon

By Kevin Pry, Associate Professor of English, Lebanon Valley College

When Julius Caesar took his legions across the Rubricon River into Italy and marched on Rome to change the old Republic forever, he knew there was no turning back--he was committed wholeheartedly to discarding an old set of assumptions and practices for new ones.  My experiences with assessment have put me into a situation that would have felt familiar to one of Caesar's veteran legionaries, for in the struggle to improve our assessment, I have had to push beyond my traditional understanding of how to use rubrics.  I have had to develop a methodology that has given new scope and effectiveness to the way I devise assignments, evaluate student work, and assess the results.  I jokingly call this change, "Crossing the Rubricon."

In the past, I used rubrics to grade major written or oral assignments, using them like checklists to determine whether or not students demonstrated their skill so that I could give specific feedback to them for the future. I was an old grading centurion following the old Roman regulations, more for discipline's sake than as an innovative tactician in the war on ignorance.  But I noticed that the use of conventional rubrics often seemed to penalize students in assignments where I was trying to promote risk-taking and creativity.  For example, in acting classes, there are some techniques and concepts that can only be learned by trying to employ them and failing at one's initial attempts to do them.

This led to Epiphany #1:  One can devise a rubric that puts a positive grade value on how useful a student's unsuccessful attempts at employing a technique was to promoting class discussions and student learning.

Of course, I had always reviewed the results of student learning, analyzing how they met/failed to meet criteria.  Before, I responded to their failures by trying new ways of teaching or discussing bewildering or confusing material.  I hadn't shifted the structure of my tried-and-true assignments because they worked for most students.  When I made the decision to cross the Rubricon and devise detailed rubrics for both large and small assignments, I discovered that the act of thinking in detail about how to use rubrics to generate evidence for course and program assessment led me to zero in on the instructions and prompts for each task, fine-tuning these to line them up with desired outcomes in a far more coherent and obvious manner.  This, naturally, is a major step in improving outcomes.

Thus, Epiphany #2:  Rubric writing is an artistically satisfying task, requiring you to analyze what you really want students to accomplish in an assignment.  Aligning prompts and instructions, criteria for evaluation, and desired outcomes produces important insights into where you should be focusing your energy and technique as a teacher.

With the push to "close the loop," I feared that the mechanics of having to assess multiple courses for multiple objectives might consume too much time and efforts.  But the insight that one detailed rubric can be made to assess multiple objectives in one cleverly designed assignment led to Epiphany #3:  That's what they meant by "work smarter, not harder."