DASA Assessment Highlights 2020-2021
Assessment within the Division of Academic and Student Affairs seeks to promote continuous improvement of courses, programs, and services. Each year, through the annual assessment reporting process, DASA units measure their progress towards their outcomes and reflect on ways to enhance their unit. This process requires that DASA staff and faculty engage in significant effort to gather data, analyze results, and disseminate and discuss results. This showcase seeks to highlight the best practices DASA units demonstrated in their 2020-2021 assessment activities: sampling, engaging students in assessment work, and engaging in trend analysis. When units engage in best practices assessment work may be more efficient and inclusive.
While DASA Assessment applauds the great assessment work many DASA units completed in 2020-2021, this page highlights the Department of Health and Exercise Studies, Student Media, and the Disability Resource Office.
Sampling
Sampling is a useful tool to keep your assessment process manageable when working with a large number of students, courses, service tickets, or documents. Sampling allows you to score, review, or observe a smaller portion of your entire population.
2020-2021 Highlight: Department of Health and Exercise Studies
The Department of Health and Exercise Studies (HES) assessed outcomes related to students’ abilities to identify and apply sport and activity-specific skills. HES offers more than 80 classes in 60 sports and activities. To assess these outcomes, HES faculty sampled various classes so that their assessment results would be reflective of students’ skills across the department. HES included 949 students in their assessment across yoga, Pilates, tennis, pickleball, and fitness and wellness courses.
There are many sampling procedures. Thoughtfully consider what may work best for you and your data, and document your sampling procedure. More information about sampling is available on our website.
Engaging Students in Assessment
Involving students in assessment can go beyond asking students to complete surveys, participate in focus groups, or submit reflection papers. You can further engage students by co-creating assessment instruments, analyzing data, and interpreting results together.
2020-2021 Highlight: Student Media Advising
Student Media assessed students’ ability to demonstrate effective announcing techniques on air at WKNC. Student Media professional staff and the student program director developed the rubric used to assess student DJs. The student general manager, student program director, and the DJ all utilized the rubric to score 30 randomly selected 1-hour DJ shifts. Rubric scores were weighted and averaged from all three assessors. Student Media professional staff shared the results and suggestions for improvement with each DJ. The student DJs appreciated the ability to provide their own input on their performance and were more receptive to feedback, as they were able to self-identify areas for improvement.
Engaging students as stakeholders in the assessment process promotes student ownership of the outcome content, provides students the opportunity to co-create their experience, and be a part of making changes to improve their learning.
Trend Analysis
When analyzing and interpreting assessment data, you may ask yourself “How does this compare to last year?” or “What changes have we seen in the past five years?” Analyzing and presenting data collected over time can help us identify important trends in student performance, user experience, and service satisfaction
2020-2021 Highlight: Disability Resource Office
The Disability Resource Office (DRO) assessed their ability to identify and remove barriers to the accommodation request process. The DRO staff use “ClockWork” to manage their data. DRO staff carefully code their interactions with registered students and faculty/staff. By tracking these interactions in the same ways year after year, the DRO is able to make data-informed decisions that affect resource allotment and departmental decision making. In reviewing the coded interactions from the past five years, the DRO staff identified their “Accommodation Plan Meetings” as an opportunity to reduce a barrier in the request process. The DRO created a “Fast Track option” for students requesting accommodations that were clearly aligned with their documented functional limitations. This option eliminated the need for 171 Accommodation Plan Meetings in 2020-2021.
Implementing strong data management practices, such as carefully labeling and codifying your data, can make it easier for you to analyze trends. When possible, include trend data in your annual outcomes assessment report.