When the Results Are Good, Showcase Them!

Good assessment helps us determine where improvements are needed. We know this. It’s basic to good teaching, and it happens all the time in courses. It might mean rephrasing or eliminating exam questions, redesigning a rubric for greater clarity, or implementing active learning strategies to help students learn difficult material.

Continuous improvement is not the sole purpose of assessment, however. Assessment, by definition, is a way to identify weaknesses and strengths. It should, and often does, yield results that might be celebrated and used to tell others about our programs. This aspect of assessment is often overlooked, though. In part, that is because it has been drummed into our heads that assessment is a way to ferret out where our efforts are unsuccessful. Another reason is that humans are hardwired for negative bias. We look at survey results, for example, and tend to see only where students are dissatisfied or unhappy.

Assessments at Utica University, particularly those done by academic departments, have produced celebration-worthy findings that that underscore the value of our programs, and we need to share these results with prospective students, their parents, potential employers, advisory boards, and community partners. They are what distinguishes us.  

In biology, for example, the results earned on the Major Field Tests in molecular biology and genetics, cell biology, organismal biology, and population biology, evolution, and ecology are benchmarked with national institutional means. Utica University’s mean scores were higher than the national mean in each subject area.

Likewise, physics students continue to surpass the national average on a survey tool measuring conceptual knowledge of mechanics.

English majors demonstrate marked improvements in their writing abilities at the end of or close to the end of their academic tenure at the University, evidence of the value-added of this program.

On a standardized pre/post assessment, students in undergraduate business programs and the MBA program demonstrated significant growth in their knowledge and skills, and the mean scores earned on the post assessment were higher than those earned by an Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs peer group.   

A student satisfaction survey administered in November 2021 showed high levels of satisfaction with support offerings, namely library resources and services, career services, tutoring, academic advising, and the availability of counseling.

What’s most encouraging about all these findings is that they came from a year when pandemic-weary students showed signs of disengagement and poor motivation.

Assessment leader Linda Suskie writes, “The higher education community has a long-standing culture of keeping its light under the proverbial bushel basket and not sharing the story of its successes with its public audiences.”

It’s time we changed that. It’s time we move the narrative past clichés and use assessment results to showcase the strengths of our programs and our students, as well as to improve our educational effectiveness.  

                                                                        Work Cited

Linda Suskie.  Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide. 2^nd ed. 

                San Francisco: Jossey- Bass, 2009.