Assessment, Eval. & Research (AER)

Reflection

From this course I have learned several aspects of what it means to do assessment in higher education. Through our semester long project, I have learned how useful the assessment is to the institution. Assessment should become more important to institutions because of the results that could be used to make the institution just better in general. A big issue on campuses today is just campus climate. Doing assessments on that could bring in new ideas and ways to make campuses a space more people want to be on. On the other hand, through doing an assessment on campus I have seen how sometimes it’s not always something that will bring results to change. Most of assessments have some sort of survey involved and its always voluntary. This can result in not enough information because students will only do if they want to. You can lead a horse to water but cannot make them drink is a great analogy for this. We can send the survey out but cannot make them take it. Which can bring a lot of frustration. In the case of our assessment these were some of the results. We were looking for BIPOC students to fill out the survey and out of the 100 or so students who did the survey I think only like 10 of them were BIPOC students. This does not help us always with the full picture. There are many positives and negatives when it comes to doing assessments.

Something else I gained through this course is the format of how to do at least a basic assessment. Certainly, doing your research before anything is majorly important. That was crucial in our assessment project. With more knowledge on the issues among BIPOC students and studying abroad allowed us as a group to create educated questions to ask in our survey. With that being said, I felt our questions may have been a little to open ended which resulted in a variety of answers, so I thought it a little more difficult to make assumptions to themes.

In the future, I would be a little bit more tight on my answers to the questions, because some students were just not yet mature enough to answer questions to a simple survey. I do realize not allowing for open ended questions can result in less diverse information, but for me I think it would be more clear when trying to code the data. I know it can be difficult but adding some sort of incentive to fill out the survey might be something I would add as well just to try to get more responses as I feel that it is necessary to bring more data to the table. I will continue to do collaborations. Our group had reached out to several different UW-System schools to gather data from their student abroad offices, and we are grateful for that extra information that they provided to us. So, continuing that collaboration will always be very impactful when working together with different perspectives.

Final Reflection

Assessment, Evaluation, and research are very important in higher education. Assessment is improvement of the institution. By taking a look into the campus population and assessing the good and bad parts of programs will only help students succeed more. In my assistantship role, with Campus Activities, we help with the 6 week engagement assessments they do each year. The events CAB holds helps determine how many students in their first and second years engage on campus in the first 6 weeks of school and how it impacts retention and their GPA. This is a really great assessment as it shows that the majority of students who participate in at least 2 events are retained and tend to have better GPA's.  

This semester I have also been tasked with researching and planning a program review with CAB to see how we are able to engage students better with different kinds of programing. Currently we do the same events every week, with some contracted events spread throughout each semester. Typically, by the evening hours the Union has very little students. The change in programming is taking a look into late night programming and researching what other schools do as well as programs that would be available to use for late nights. I am attending the regional conference for NACA (National Association for Campus Activities) this will help in the research of how to bring late night programming back to UWL's campus.

I will continue to grow in this area by doing research on best ways to do assessment of specific areas of higher education and taking a deeper dive into what to do once the information is collected. I have not been through a whole process of assessing something so I look forward to helping curate something from start to completion of an assessment.