Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

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Institutional Assessment: The Art of Self-Reflection

8/30/2006

By Matt Villano

As the technology continues to improve, colleges and universities devise new ways of mastering institutional assessment: some vendor-based, some homegrown, some combinations of both.

METAPHYSICALLY SPEAKING, the idea of self-reflection has been the subject of discussion for thousands of years. There are mentions of it in the Bible. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle spoke of it in Classical Greece. The idea carried human beings through the Renaissance, and an entire movement tied to it sparked a sociopolitical movement called the Enlightenment. In more recent times, thought leaders such as Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud all have opined on the subject of our ability to look inside ourselves and act accordingly. It is, as Kant once wrote, the very thing that makes humans “rational animals.”

The art of self-reflection is alive and well in academia today. College and university administrators apply the same philosophical tenet to their own operations, utilizing a variety of methods to figure out how to maximize efficiencies and minimize waste. By reflecting on their priorities, goals, and processes, schools can get a better sense of important quantifiable data such as student matriculation, average class size, employee benefits spending, financial aid awards, and research dollars, to name a few of the more commonly aggregated and mined data. As an administrator you no doubt are familiar with the process termed “institutional assessment,” but you may not fully realize just how critical it is to your school’s ability to meet its institutional goals and fulfill its mission, not to mention meet its more routine—but no less essential—needs.

According to Catherine Burdt, senior analyst for Eduventures, the Boston-based education technology research organization, “At a time when schools need hard facts for purposes of budget exploration and accreditation, these practices help feed a culture of evidence.” Moreover, Burdt stresses that “the more energy a school spends on assessment, the more that school understands how things work best.”

And though institutional assessment practices aren’t perfect, many of them have helped schools get a better sense of how performance varies over time. What’s more—at least in some cases— interfacing with data from the federal Department of Education has enabled schools to get a firm grasp on the way their institutional performance compares to that of their peers. Yet, no matter how schools tackle the issue of assessment, Michael Redmond, VP of technology, information services, and institutional effectiveness at Bergen Community College (NJ), maintains that investigating operational efficiencies will only make schools stronger over time.

“For just about every school, time spent evaluating processes is a good thing,” says Redmond, whose own institution recently launched a three-year initiative to move beyond the traditional method of charting institutional assessment by hand, via spreadsheets. “The more familiar you are with how things happen, the better you’ll get at making sure that what happens is what’s best.”

In the past, in fact, staffers at most schools carried out many assessment functions by hand, cross-referencing spreadsheets and other forms of paperwork in an attempt to chart mission-critical performance. Nowadays, however, a growing number of schools are embracing data-driven web-based interfaces and new data analysis techniques to ease the process. Schools such as Texas A&M University, the University of Central Florida, the University of California-Davis, Western Washington University, and Flagler College (FL) are utilizing new advances in institutional assessment tools in order to improve performance across the board. While some of these colleges and universities are using homegrown systems, others have turned to the vendor community for help.