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Getting faculty and staff motivated and involved in meaningful assessment
A critical step in developing a meaningful educational outcomes program is to address head-on some pervasive issues of faculty motivation. One of the primary reasons that some assessment programs across disciplines are weak is that they not only lack faculty involvement but also suffer resistance among faculty and administrators.
That resistance is probably due in large part to the perception that outcomes assessment involves the use of educational and psychometric jargon to describe program indices that are not relevant to the everyday activities of faculty members and students. By including our faculty, and perhaps some student representatives, in discussions of what would characterize a more meaningful assessment scheme to match the missions and needs of our individual programs, and by agreeing to develop our outcomes assessment practices from the bottom up, rather than in response to top-down demands from administrators and accrediting agencies, we are apt to win the support of some of our current skeptics on our faculties.
Additional factors that might give faculty the incentive to get involved in enriching assessment practices include:
· consideration of outcomes assessment work as part of annual merit reviews;
· provision of materials, such as sample instruments, to simplify the assessment instrument design process;
· demonstration of means by which certain assessments, such as student exit or employer surveys, may be used to your program’s advantage in negotiations with your administration (for example, to help justify funds for new equipment, facilities, or salaries for faculty and supervisory positions); and
· noticing and rewarding curricular modifications and explorations of innovative teaching methods initiated by the faculty in response to program assessments.
This text adapted from:
Hallowell, B. & Lund, N. (1998). Fostering program improvements through a focus on educational outcomes. In Council of Graduate Programs in Communication Sciences and Disorders, Proceedings of the twenty-first annual conference on graduate education, 32-56.