Marilee Bresciani Visits UNC
Next Steps
Workshop participants were invited to reflect on the next steps they need to take in order to implement systematic program assessment. Here’s what they had to say about . . .
- Making time
- Setting priorities
- Identifying goals and outcomes
- Developing assessment plans
- Evaluating current activities
- Involving staff
- Participating in professional development
Making time
- Take the time to sit down and come up with goals. Sometimes areas think that everything is o.k. and don’t do any action to see what needs to be done.
- Finding time and resources.
- Taking the time to develop outcome-based assessment versus satisfaction surveys among a broad range of programs.
Setting priorities
- Set aside time to make program assessment a priority.
- To determine which areas are priorities and take action!!
- Narrow down priorities that we are doing collectively.
- Prioritizing what gets assessed.
Identifying goals and outcomes
- Spending some time creating learning objectives for our department.
- To clearly identify the outcomes we strive to yield!
- Redefine outcomes
- Identify specific learning objectives.
- Identify basic outcomes and assessment methods.
- Clarify and communicate intended outcomes in all areas (they are there – just foggy in placed and not well communicated in general).
- Define/redefine outcomes.
Developing assessment plans
- Concentrated time to work together to develop outcomes – delivery – evaluation pieces for goals developed earlier this year.
- Develop 5-7 year assessment plan – integrate this into annual goal setting process.
- Create developmental plans – putting our vision on paper – by doing this, creating assessment opportunities
- To sit down and develop a plan and outcomes, then make it a priority to implement.
- Put the items we’ve come up with on paper and implement the approach.
- We need to begin identifying ways to measure our identified outcomes as a part of early discussions.
- Better documentation of the entire assessment process.
Evaluating current activities
- Deep evaluations of our (lack of) outreach programs.
- Rework our current outcome statements.
- Revisit our program events and self assess.
- Mold goals/delivery methods already established into the whole assessment plan.
- Reviewing or taking a look at current assessment and making sure it is what we really want assessed, and pinpoint the outcome (that we want the assessment to look at).
Involving staff
- We start implementing this process at meetings tomorrow!
- Allow someone to be the driver. Eliminate big committees that get nothing done and keep focusing on details instead of improvement.
- Discussion among colleagues – make it an office value.
- Educate our staff and choose goals/objectives to focus on this year.
- Meeting with staff.
- Bring back to office staff and go over steps with them to show that results can happen with outcomes-based assessment
- Continue the conversation and refine our evaluation efforts as well as better train new staff to set and measure outcomes.
Participating in professional development
- Participate in the Assessment Institute.
- Ongoing support and discussion about what we are doing and how we are doing it.
- Attending meetings over the next 9 months with other University staff.
- Continued expertise help with becoming more outcome-based.
- I will be taking the monthly series, so this is probably the next step after this workshop.