Assessment and Evaluation of Faculty Collaborations
BY KIM C. O’HALLORAN
Collaboration between student affairs and
academic affairs can lead to programs, activities,
and initiatives that enhance student learning,
increase organizational efficiency, promote
student retention, and transform institutional
cultures. As with any worthwhile effort, ensuring that these
partnerships lead to desired outcomes is vital.
Why is it important to assess our work with faculty and
others in academic affairs? First, it allows us to determine to
what degree our efforts are working and whether we are
accomplishing our desired goals. Second, it helps to determine
whether such projects are a good use of staff time and institutional resources. Third, in a higher education climate where
there are increasing calls for accountability, assessing student
outcomes to quantify results of our work is important. Finally,
it provides us with valuable information to build better
programs in the future. In general, assessment and evaluation
allow us to collect and analyze a variety of information related
to our collaborative activities and give us tools to improve
these initiatives.
Conducting Your Assessment
Determining the focus of your assessment is an important first step in this process. Do you want to assess one
specific activity, such as a service-learning course, or will you
examine the level and degree of collaboration with faculty
across the institution? If you assess a specific activity, what
do you want to learn? For example, if you assess collaboration around a first-year experience course, you may want to
look at how that course impacts student retention during the
first year and through the second year. Such assessment
activities may include:
• student surveys to understand their perceptions of the
course’s helpfulness at various points throughout the first year;
• comparison of student academic performance and student
perceptions between course sections that include faculty–
student affairs collaboration and those that do not;
• comparison of first- to second-year retention of students
who completed course sections that included faculty–student
affairs collaboration and those who did not.
It is important to first understand what you are trying to
learn, and then choose the type(s) of assessment that will best
provide that information. Quantitative methods such as
surveys and data analysis are good tools to illustrate what is
happening and to what degree. If you are trying to learn why
or how something is taking place, qualitative
tools such as interviews, focus groups, or
reviews of documents such as student journals are more appropriate. Often, using
both types of tools or a mixed methods
approach will provide a comprehensive
assessment of a program.
Identify who will be conducting the assessment. To
ensure that the results are accurate, it is important to have the
assessment conducted by someone who is trained in the
appropriate methods. The implementation of assessment
provides yet another opportunity to collaborate with faculty,
who often conduct similar types of assessment in their own
research. As an incentive, faculty will have access to data and
resources that not only may lead to improvements in institutional practice, but also may provide them with scholarly
publication opportunities. Your campus institutional research
staff often have access to student data that you may need or
find helpful during the course of your assessment. You might
also consider gathering a variety of committed faculty and
staff together as a committee to oversee and implement the
assessment process.
Determine how this information will be shared, with
whom it will be shared, and how it will be utilized to evaluate and improve the program, activity, or initiative.
Should it be shared exclusively with those involved in the
project or with a larger audience in student affairs or academic
affairs? If you would like to expand this project to other parts
of your campus, sharing assessment and evaluation results may
help you affect that change. If you discover that your partnership has made a positive impact on student learning or success
or has improved organizational effectiveness in some other
way, consider publishing an article to share your experience
with others in the profession.
Such an assessment was conducted in a research study
at a midwestern university by T.L. North in 2007 entitled,
“Formative Evaluation of an Innovative First-Year
Experience Program.” Faculty were encouraged and
supported in their efforts to incorporate concepts of first-year experience programs into existing entry-level and
general education courses, which led to a comprehensive,
year-long, first-year experience program. The program was
assessed in its first year using mixed methods, including
student and faculty surveys, national survey results, and
university retention data. The results demonstrated that the
new first-year experience program positively affected student
satisfaction with institutional fit, which is a key factor influencing student persistence.
We typically put a great deal of energy, time, and resources
into new programs at our institutions, and developing those
programs in partnership with others is not always easy. Taking
the time up front to plan assessment while we plan a program
is a useful endeavor and may help us better accomplish set
goals for our students and for our institutions.
Kim C. O’Halloran is associate dean of the College of Education and
Human Services and assistant professor of counseling and educational
leadership at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.
