A Crash Course in Assessment
After completing my first year of graduate school this past May, I began an internship in D.C. at the William & Mary Washington Center, an office that supports "Study in DC" opportunities for William & Mary students. These include year-round opportunities to earn academic credit and intern in D.C. with the advantage of professional networking, mentorship, site visits, and other resources staff can help facilitate.
One of the larger projects my fellow graduate intern and I were tasked with this summer was to complete a diversity assessment of the Washington Center office. If you haven't encountered the term before, assessment in higher education typically involves the process of gathering information and data to better understand the educational experiences of students.
Often assessment is tied to specified learning outcomes—or knowledge, skills, and/or behaviors students are expected to achieve through participation in a particular program.
Assessment is definitely a word I've come across frequently in my both my work and study of higher education during the past year. It seems to be one of those things every office wants to do well, but can't find the capacity to do. It could also be that many offices are reluctant to study the impact or learning outcomes of their programs because they are afraid of what they might discover. But if the goal is to serve students, which I believe to be true of practically all higher education offices, it's impossible to do that well if you don't know where you're succeeding and where you can most improve.
In the case of our diversity assessment, we were primarily concerned with learning how our office can build on its efforts to provide welcoming and supportive learning opportunities for all William & Mary students.
Even though it seemed like a challenge to assess an entirely new office's diversity efforts, top to bottom, in just 12 weeks, I looked forward to the opportunity to devote the majority of my time to such an important aspect of education.
When my colleague and I discussed this project for the first time in late May, we quickly realized just how much of an undertaking this would be. With a few weeks left, here's where our work has taken us so far:
individual meetings with our office's 7 staff members to better understand advertising, recruitment, and programming involved in the opportunities they manage
conducting focus groups with current Washington Center students on the topic of diversity
interviewing staff at peer institutions to learn about their best practices
organizing a day of meetings at the William & Mary main campus to meet with offices that work directly with aspects of diversity (Student Accessibility, Center for Student Diversity, etc.)
creating separate climate surveys to send to students/alumni, faculty, and staff
researching diversity themed trainings, resources, and workshops that our office can utilize
planning new web content and student resources on different aspects of diversity
We've also made headway on the culmination of this assessment, which will be an 8-10 page diversity report and executive summary with resources and recommendations the office can use to advance their diversity efforts moving forward.
Currently, we're sorting and coding survey responses and creating graphics and other appendix material to make the findings of our report easier to digest. It's been a long project, but one that I'll be happy to have taken part in. Any advice or best practices related to assessment you'd be willing to share? I'd love to hear from you.
