From Data to Impact: Strategies for Holistic Academic Assessment

Introduction

Assessment has long been a cornerstone of higher education, serving as a function to meet compliance requirements and as a tool for ensuring that the educational promise is met. While academic assessment is important to meet the requirements of formal accrediting bodies, its role has always extended far beyond mere regulatory compliance. Assessment is central to measuring student learning outcomes, identifying areas for enhancement, and ultimately improving program quality.

Despite the critical role assessment plays, many continue to view assessment as a burdensome exercise that consumes valuable faculty time. Each year, faculty and administrators must manually hunt for data and assemble disparate pieces of information to create assessment plans and analyze outcomes. This fragmented process not only creates inefficiencies but also risks losing track of the real objectives meant to drive improvement. Fortunately, emerging tools and data sources are transforming the assessment cycle, offering streamlined processes that both simplify data collection and ensure that recommendations are effectively implemented.

This white paper is designed to guide academic leaders through the process of auditing their current assessment practices, enhancing the collection and management of assessment plans and results, and, ultimately, closing the loop on recommendations to transform data into tangible impact.

Assessment Practices Audit

To better understand where your institution can improve your assessment practices, the following audit will help you understand where there may be challenges at each stage of the assessment cycle. This audit walks through a series of questions to identify challenges and bottlenecks at each stage of the assessment cycle, offering insights into areas that require improvement. 

Areas to Examine During an Assessment Audit

• Lack of standardization across processes, tools, and timelines
• Accountability challenges
• Manual work and time-consuming tasks
• Data accessibility
• Ability to follow through on recommendations

Creating & Collecting Assessment Plans

• Standardization & Templates
  
  • Does each academic unit create its assessment plan from scratch or use standardized templates?
  • If templates are provided, what percentage of units use them? 
  • How frequently are assessment plans submitted with missing components? 
• Timeline Consistency
  
  • Do all units adhere to a uniform timeline for plan creation, submission, and collection?
  • How often is follow-up required to ensure timely submissions?
• Accountability Mechanisms
  
  • What mechanisms do you have in place to hold units accountable for submitting their assessment plans on schedule?
  • Who holds units accountable for submitting timely assessment plans? Does this person have the authority to ensure follow through?  

Filling Out Assessment Plans

• Data Sources and Information Retrieval
  
  • How many data sources (indirect/direct measures) do faculty or assessment coordinators rely on to complete their plans?
  • What types of information (e.g., learning outcomes, course or program data) are most challenging to locate?
• Efficiency of Submission Process
  
  • How long does it take to compile all necessary information?
  • How are completed assessment reports submitted? Do all units submit via the same method (e.g., email, a platform), or does it vary? 
• Progress Monitoring and Follow-up
  
  • Do you have mechanisms to see the progress each unit has made toward completing their assessment reports? 
  • How often do incomplete submissions occur? 
  • How frequently do you have to follow-up with units to submit their completed assessment reports?
  • What mechanisms for accountability do you have to ensure completed assessment reports are submitted on time?

Taking Action on Assessment Plan Results

• Implementation Process
  
  • Are you able to easily access all assessment recommendations in one location?
  • Is each recommendation assigned to a person to own? 
  • Is there an established process for units to follow to implement recommendations?
  • How long does it typically take between a recommendation being made and a unit implementing the recommendation? 
• Effectiveness & Follow-through
  
  • What percentage of recommendations are ultimately acted upon?
  • Can you easily access recommendations from previous assessment cycles?
  • Do you have a process for looking back on previous recommendations to determine if they’ve been acted on? 

Strategies to Collect Assessment Plans & Results

While collecting assessment plans may sound like a simple task, this process often plagues administrators. Administrators spend significant time tracking down and collecting assessment plans from various locations. Even once plans are collected, they may not have all of the information they need, leading to a back-and-forth with academic units.

To streamline the collection of assessment plans, consider implementing the following three strategies to save time, increase transparency, and promote accountability.

Standardize Forms

A common assessment challenge stems from irregularities across how units create their assessment plans. Each unit creates their own form for their assessment plan, leading to different fields and different ways of structuring information. This can lead to missing information and lots of back-and-forth between units and assessment administrators.

To combat irregularity, institutions should leverage standardized forms to ensure assessment plans always provide the needed information. Clear guidelines embedded within the standardized forms help faculty understand exactly what information is expected and reduce ambiguity. This is particularly critical when specific information is needed for accreditation.

While the forms may vary across disciplines or academic units, using a set of standardized forms makes it easier for both faculty and administrators. Administrators no longer need to regularly provide corrections and follow-up with units to request additional information.

Collect Plans & Results in One Central Location

Many institutions don’t have a central place to collect assessment plans, meaning that assessment plans live across multiple locations. Assessment plans may live in different emails, spreadsheets, across multiple online folders, or in other tools. This makes it difficult to keep track of all assessment plans and know which ones have been completed and which ones are still pending.

Transitioning from dispersed data storage to a single, centralized platform helps address these challenges. A central location not only simplifies tracking but also ensures that historical assessment plans are easily accessible, regardless of staff turnover or other disruptions.

Collecting all assessment plans in one central location allows administrators to have a complete picture of where they stand on assessment. This allows administrators to easily see who has submitted their plans and who still needs to. Additionally, administrators can easily reference previous assessment plans so they don’t need to go digging through inboxes, online folders, and more.

Connect Data Sources to Collect Assessment Information

Connect your assessment platform with critical data systems such as your Student Information System (SIS), Learning Management System (LMS), and curriculum management tools. Integration with these critical systems saves faculty and administrators from having to track down information and manually enter it into the assessment plans. 

For example, connecting to your SIS or curriculum platform allows faculty to pull in curriculum information such as curriculum maps, course descriptions, and learning outcomes directly into their assessment plan. Similarly, connecting to your LMS enables faculty to automatically pull in rubric data and student assessment results.

By reducing the manual effort required to search for and enter data, faculty and administrators can devote more time to analysis and decision-making, ultimately increasing the likelihood of timely submissions and higher-quality assessments.

Increase Transparency & Accountability

Collecting and storing assessment plans in one central location yields additional benefits for those managing the assessment cycle. Centralizing assessment plans fosters transparency by providing a clear view of submission statuses for all parties, thereby encouraging timely completion of assessment plans. Similarly, transparent reporting and dashboards that highlight outstanding submissions and progress enable administrators to quickly identify and address areas where units may be lagging.

Greater visibility also allows units that have developed strong assessment plans to share insights and best practices with others, promoting overall institutional improvement. For example, is there one unit in particular who created a particularly strong assessment plan? It can be helpful to share that assessment plan with other units so they can learn other beneficial practices that they can implement. 

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Closing the Loop on Assessment Recommendations

Once assessment plans have been collected, analyzed, and approved, the next critical step is “closing the loop” by acting on the recommendations. This phase is essential for translating data insights into meaningful improvements for program quality and student outcomes. 

However, the process of closing the loop can be complex. Translating recommendations into action often requires a whole other set of time-consuming processes. For example, curricular changes often require a series of approvals from different administrators and committees on-campus. 

The following section will discuss how administrators can promote closing the loop by leveraging their assessment findings in conjunction with their curriculum management process. 

Leveraging Your Assessment Function and Curriculum Management Function Together

Many action items coming out of assessment cycles directly pertain to curricular changes—such as adding or removing courses, updating course descriptions, adjusting course sequences, or revising learning outcomes. Once an assessment cycle is complete, units receive a report that highlights which learning outcomes were not met and recommendations about how to close the gaps. 

By managing the assessment function and curriculum management function in the same platform, institutions can enable faculty and administrators to easily initiate recommended curricular changes. To facilitate this, ensure that faculty and staff can access the assessment action items and kick off proposed curricular changes within the same platform.  

Steps to Close the Assessment Loop on Curricular Action Items 

• Review recommended action items from the annual assessment report
• Assign action items to responsible parties 
• Assigned party kicks off process/workflow to make recommended curricular change
• Proposed curricular change goes through pre-established workflow for approval
• Proposed change approved and implemented 
• Curricular change recorded and documented 
• Assessment staff able to reference implemented changes when creating following year’s assessment plan 

After proposed assessment curricular changes are approved and implemented, administrators also need to be able to retroactively see these changes. For example, assessment staff need to be able to easily access recommendations and changes from the previous year when they are creating the assessment plan for the coming year. 

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Ultimately, the goal of leveraging your assessment and curriculum management process in tandem is to ensure that every actionable recommendation is acted on and leads to trackable improvements in academic programs. By connecting data to action, institutions can create a culture of continuous improvement that benefits both faculty and students.