As we are gearing up for students to return to campus (in person or virtually), it’s time to start thinking about our program and service delivery. Obviously, I think that assessment should be a part of the planning and decision making process. But, I also strongly advocate for including students in the assessment process, especially if the assessment is about learning and student engagement.
A simple assessment cycle would go something like this: Determine your mission, goals, and outcomes. Plan how to deliver and assess your program/service/experience. Deliver that program. Collect data. Analyze and interpret data. Make a decision about improvements to your program. Tell people about your assessment. Implement those changes. Start the cycle again, being sure to reassess to know whether your changes made a positive difference with your participants. Let’s look at those steps individually to see how you could include student voices in each step.
Determine your mission, goals, and outcomes. Do you ask students about what they want to learn and be able to do following some experience? Do you engage them in updating the mission statement? Do you ask student leaders what they want their organization to accomplish? Do you all agree on what success looks like? How can you include multiple voices that you may not normally hear from?
Plan how to deliver and assess the experience. This gets into the logistics of the process. How would students like to deliver their experience (in person, virtually, hybrid)? How many people will be there? What is the goal of the program? What assessment methods will be used to determine success? Have you asked students how they want to be assessed? If you are planning on teaching effective verbal communication skills to 300 people in a one-hour workshop, you may not have time for each participant to practice a skill and get feedback on their performance. That’s why planning and assessment should be happening together. Have you gotten feedback from your participants, employees, or student leaders about how they could best represent their learning and development? A survey may be easy, but it may not be the best way to measure knowledge and learning.
Deliver the program. Is everyone clear about what the outcome and content are? How are you including students in program delivery? Are you able to use students to engage with other students? (Doing that will also increase the skills of the students who are presenting material.) Have you talked ahead of time about where assessment happens in the program delivery?
Collect data. Hopefully, you asked students ahead of time about how best they can demonstrate their learning. At this point in the cycle, can you engage students in the data collection? Maybe you are using a rubric to measure a leadership skill (verbal communication, event planning, meeting facilitation, etc.). Can the executive student leadership be trained to use the rubric to provide feedback to the next level of leaders? Can your students be assessment cheerleaders in talking to their peers about the importance of participating in the assessment?
Analyze and interpret data. Do you include students in analyzing the data and making meaning of it? Have you scheduled a meeting with students to do that? Do you bring multiple voices to the table to give you a variety of perspectives? This can be particularly useful and insightful if you have qualitative data. Students are good about providing the feedback about the student experience because they are living it.
Make a decision about improvements to your program. Based what you are hearing from students, what do you need to do to improve? Have you asked students what specific changes they would make based on the peer feedback? What are their change priorities? What options might they think of that have not crossed your mind?
Tell people about your assessment. When you have assessment results and plans for change, do you tell students about it? Do you present to student leaders, event participants, student employees, student advisory groups? Do you post assessment information on your website to be transparent with students? Have you asked student leaders to present information to stakeholders? All of this helps participants know that you listened to their feedback, which may encourage them to participate in future assessment.
Implement those changes. How have you included students in implementing changes? It could be something that changes in the student organization or with a service you provide. Is it something that they can help implement, so they have ownership in the changes? Students can also be cheerleaders here by telling their peers about the positive changes that have been made.
Start the cycle again and reassess. Have you included students in how you will reassess to be sure the changes are working? Have expressed a desire to have them involved in future changes and assessment?
If you are not incorporating students into your assessment process, you are losing important student voices. Assessment becomes something you do to students, rather than something you do with and for students. People buy into what they help create. Do not underestimate students’ ability to engage in every step of the assessment process. They can be really insightful and develop skills they can use after graduation. Student Life Studies is always here to help you in that process. Please let us know how we can help.