Beginning our assessment plan

We know the work we do in student affairs matters. But can we prove it? 

Learning is difficult to measure. Faculty have the advantage of using the commonly understood and accepted method of grades to measure learning and development. Learning outside the classroom does not possess this advantage. With financial resources for higher education dwindling and expectations of accountability rising those of us in Student Affairs run the risk of losing resources and influence because we cannot point to established quantitative metrics to show the contributions we make to student learning and development. 

One of my priorities in my role at uWaterloo has been creating an assessment plan so my team and I can more clearly describe how effective (or not) our work is in achieving our objectives. At the highest level we want to demonstrate how our work in Housing and Residences contributes to our student's learning and development. A campus housing operation has many functions which all make a contribution to our overall objective and I believe it's important to show how each function makes a contribution. 

An early action we undertook was having managers in different functional areas identify Key Performance Indicators. Mike Iley in Cleaning Services and Jessica Lang in Residence Life were the first to establish KPIs in consultation with their teams. Here are the KPI scorecards they developed: 

• Cleaning Services KPI scorecard
• Residence Life KPI scorecard

One of the most important actions taken has been to hire Andrew Noble as a Project Coordinator and outlining that his major project was to take the lead in creating an assessment plan for the department. Andrew was hired in May 2013 and at the most recent OACUHO conference at Wilfrid Laurier University Andrew and I were given the opportunity to outline the progress we've made with our assessment plan to date. Here are the slides we used in the presentation:

Developing an Assessment Action Plan

More PowerPoint presentations from Glen

One of the greatest achievements I've seen in the past year has been the change in departmental culture around assessment. My team went from being uneasy to a place where staff display curiosity about how we go about our work and the impact our work has on learning and development. I'm excited to see how our culture around assessment continues to evolve.