Learning to Do Assessment by Asking Questions

I was recently preparing for a presentation about incorporating assessment in our daily conversations in student affairs, and I thought about my own introduction to assessment in student affairs. Prior to engaging in assessment work, I had no formal training beyond the required research methods course in my master’s program. What led me to working with assessment came as the result of feeling energized after hearing a speaker who the vice president for student affairs brought to campus. That speaker, Dr. Richard Keeling, talked about the importance of connecting what we do to what our students should be gaining from their experiences, and the importance of assessing student learning. Following Dr. Keeling’s visit, I mentioned to the director of my department that I wanted to learn more about assessment. The next thing I knew was that I would be traveling to a retention and assessment conference as part of an institutional team. The conference was structured in such a way to give institutional teams time to meet with experts in the areas of retention and assessment, including Dr. Vincent Tinto and Dr. Marilee Bresciani. I was hooked on assessment.

Following those amazing learning experiences, I returned to my campus, ready to change the world of student affairs through assessment. I was energized, but quickly realized that although I had gained a great deal through conference experiences, I really knew little about assessment. I had started to develop a baseline level of knowledge, but now I needed to translate that into skill development. I took my next step in learning about assessment by becoming a voracious reader and consumer of information about assessment-related materials. The first book I read was Assessment Essentials: Planning, Implementing and Improving Assessment in Higher Education (1999) by Palomba and Banta. This text provided me with some big-picture perspectives on assessment, and helped me think of more questions to which I needed answers.

I kept reading, but I wasn’t finding the answers in books, articles, or websites. I quickly realized that I needed to ask questions of people with expertise in a variety of areas. One of the first things I needed help with was determining a sample size for a survey-based assessment project. If you Google “sample size calculator,” you will see a large number of results, just as I did. After clicking through several options in the search results, I saw variations in sample size calculators. That was when I realized I needed to seek out someone on my own campus. I began my search for such a person by asking staff for suggestions of people with expertise in statistics. What I got was a lengthy list of faculty from a variety of academic disciplines, staff in the institutional research office, and a staff member in academic affairs whose job title included the words Quality Improvement. I emailed the staff member in academic affairs and asked if I pick his brain over a cup of coffee. He offered some great advice, not only on calculating a sample size (he said he has a sample size calculator bookmarked that he found through a web search), but also on ways to continue my path of learning assessment by doing assessment.

My learning continued in a number of ways. I kept having chats over coffee with other faculty and staff, which eventually become more about sharing and dialog than me simply seeking answers. I read more and more, part of which had to do with beginning my doctoral studies. I engaged in some trial and error when it came to statistical analysis. I learned a lot by presenting findings to constituent and stakeholder groups. Ultimately what I learned was that I had more to learn. In the three and a half years that I worked directly with assessment, I felt that I only scratched the surface of assessment knowledge.

Now that I teach a graduate course on assessment in student affairs, I often find myself drawing on the experiences I had in those three and a half years. In the nearly seven years that have passed since I left my full-time position to transition to the professoriate, I have continued to think of more questions about assessment to which I want answers. As I continue my own learning and development in assessment, I look for ways to share that with my students and other student affairs educators. After all, isn’t assessment about seeking answers to questions?