restructuring academic programs
Program and Course Assessment

Restructuring Academic Programs into Larger Divisions 

Since 2013, economists and financial strategists have insisted that higher education must reduce its costs. In fact, the Moody’s perception of mounting fiscal pressure on all key university revenue sources led to the 2013 downgrade of the credit rating for the entire sector (Moody’s, 2013). But even before the 2008-09 economic crash, the Berea College administration realized that its budget was not fully sustainable in the long term. In 2008, almost 80 percent of Berea’s budget came from its endowment, which by March 2009 dropped from more than $1 billion to less than $700 million.

How to Lead Assessment in Your Unit
Administration, Program and Course Assessment

How to Lead Assessment in Your Unit 

Being in charge of assessment within one’s unit involves more than measuring student learning outcomes. It’s about leading cultural change, a process that is best undertaken in collaboration with those who know the discipline, program, and students best—the faculty and staff.

In an interview with Academic Leader, Linda Neavel Dickens, director of institutional accreditation and program assessment at The University of Texas at Austin, offered advice on how to lead this collaborative process.

capstone course
Program and Course Assessment

Can a Capstone Course Try to Accomplish Too Much? 

Kristi Upson-Saia thinks it can, and she has data from one field that supports her belief. When her religious studies department (at Occidental College) decided to reassess its capstone course, Upson-Saia looked for relevant publications in her field. Finding few, she began collecting data from other religious studies departments. She asked those departments to explain their course objectives and share capstone materials such as guidelines, checklists, websites, and syllabi. Her analysis of religious study capstones includes data from 29 different programs, and what she found is typical of the descriptive analysis of capstones completed in several other fields. The courses have different objectives, they address content in different ways, and students complete a variety of assignments, although most involve the application of research skills used in the field.

Putting Assessment in Its Place
Administration, Program and Course Assessment

Putting Assessment in Its Place 

What can you do with four minutes?

You can close the report and check the clock, update your to-do list, sort through your mail, or respond to a minor e-mail query. There are many important tasks you can do in four minutes. And if you don’t do them now, you’ll just have to find another four minutes later. Of course, none of this matters if you have plenty of time and too little to do, but most institutions have finite resources and must be deliberate in how they use them. Program assessment presents a special challenge to resource allocation, requiring a similarly deliberate approach.

Seven Important Factors in Program Assessment
Administration, Program and Course Assessment

Seven Important Factors in Program Assessment 

“No one should be surprised to learn that faculty (in general) have not enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to see if their students measure up to those at other universities or to the expectations of their professors,” writes Diane Halpern in a “personalized review” of assessment programs in general and in her field of psychology. (p. 358) Faculty who believed assessment was another of those “trendy things” destined to pass once something else new came along have been proven wrong. The assessment movement is now close to 30 years old and still very much a part of the higher education scene. Institutions found it hard to ignore once it started being a condition for receiving federal funds and a review criteria used by the national accrediting associations and various professional program reviewing agencies.

Reviewing and updating some of her previous writings, Halpern suggests the list of factors important in program assessment have not changed but merit regular review. Here’s a summary of those seven factors drawn from a more detailed discussion of them that appears in the article referenced below: