Supporting Students' College Success The Role of Assessment of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Competencies (2017) / Chapter Skim
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4 Assessment Uses and Stakeholders within Higher Education
4 Assessment Uses and Stakeholders within Higher Education
Pages 117-152
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From page 117... ...
In this report, the committee recommends further research to better understand each group of competencies and their relationships to students' college success, research that reflects one vital use of assessment. In addition, if research confirms these relationships, assessments of these competencies can provide data useful for informing college decision making and buttressing improvements in teaching, learning, and co-curricular support services.
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From page 118... ...
Large majorities of respondents reported that their institution had identified specific student learning outcomes and that assessment of these outcomes had increased since 2009. Hart Research Associates (2016)
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. This tension between the two uses in the literature is apparent in a recent survey on assessment of student learning outcomes (Kuh et al., 2014)
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, their role in college success, and effective programs and strategies for supporting them. Selection and Placement of Individual Students College admissions officers use letters of recommendation as informal representations of intra- and interpersonal competencies, and formal measures also have been developed for this purpose.
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They drew on prior studies that found that scores on assessments of certain competencies were correlated with indicators of college success (Robbins et al., 2004, 2006)
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report that institutions frequently assess student learning outcomes for internal improvement purposes, including an institutional commitment to improving, faculty or staff interest in improving student learning, president and/or governing board direction, and concerns about the effectiveness and value of education. One example of an improvement-oriented assessment process is that of Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which engaged administrators, faculty, and students in conversations over the course of several years to reimagine its curriculum.
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Accordingly, Alverno uses assessment data in an ongoing process to improve educational practices and increase student learning, including learning in these intraand inter ersonal domains (Mentkowski et al., 2000)
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And as noted in Chapter 3, further research and development of assessments also is needed to define these competencies more clearly and measure them more accurately and to guide assessment users in drawing valid inferences from the resulting data. Accountability The committee defines accountability as a summative process through which a person, program, or institution is judged against some standard in a way that is comparable across individuals, programs, and/or institutions (Ewell, 2008; Suskie, 2009)
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In the K-12 context, state educational content standards and performance benchmarks guide the interpretation of student assessment data. In higher education, by contrast, accrediting agencies allow institutions to self-define their own standards for student learning based on their unique missions.
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Stakeholders in higher education may focus on different cognitive, intrapersonal, or interpersonal competencies when planning to assess them for different purposes. Competencies assessed at the institutional level for accountability purposes need to reflect the broad mission and learning outcomes of the institution, but faculty members would place higher priority on assessing competencies that advance the learning goals of their specific courses (Suskie, 2009)
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From page 127... ...
For formative improvement purposes, for example, evidence is needed to establish that a particular construct is relevant to improvement (e.g., sense of belonging or growth mindset matters in a particular context) , that the construct is well measured (the assessment is valid, reliable, and fair)
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From page 128... ...
and longer-term development and support. In the former case, if higher education institutions were able to clearly articulate a set of desired student competencies based on research demonstrating their relationship to college success, then measures of individual status would assist families and students in demonstrating competencies needed for successful admission to these institutions.
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From page 129... ...
. The growing number of schools that are currently focusing on "21st-century" competencies are already using assessments of these competencies for all four of these purposes, as demonstrated in a recent review of schools identified by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning as "exemplar schools" (Brown, 2014)
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From page 130... ...
. In another example of potential formative use, a professor could choose a competency that is relevant to a specific course, assess students' level of that competency at the beginning of the course, and plan for how to use the assessment data to modify the teaching approaches used in the course later in the semester to enhance that competency (Suskie, 2009)
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. College admissions staff could use data from assessments of competencies clearly related to college success for purposes of selection or gatekeeping, while student affairs staff could use the data primarily for improvement and research and evaluation purposes.
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College and University Leaders and Administrators College administrators, such as presidents, deans, and department heads, are responsible for delivering and improving the education provided to students in the aggregate. Whereas college faculty care about shortcycle improvements in ongoing courses and course redesign to enhance student development and content knowledge, administrators are likely to be more concerned with long-term development of students' intra- and interpersonal competencies and the relationship of these competencies to retention, graduation, and success in careers in the aggregate.5 In addition, assessment information on students' intra- and interpersonal competencies could be useful to administrators for the evaluation and improvement of degree programs, courses, instructors, co-curricular activities, and equity.
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From page 133... ...
Note also that, although the table is organized by stakeholder group, the committee argues below that the use of data for institutional change and improvement is likely to be most effective when different stakeholders act in concert across levels, drawing on multiple sources of assessment data (Chatterji, 2005; Dowd and Tong, 2007)
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Are there ways does my child have the improving my intra- and family support during to document my learning necessary competencies for interpersonal competencies college influence students' of intra- and interpersonal success at this particular during college, and what development of intra- and competencies for job search college/in this major? do I need to continue to interpersonal competencies?
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intra- and interpersonal improvement for the purposes What proportion of our competencies lead to of institutional accreditation? underrepresented students improved outcomes for are deficient in these underrepresented student competencies when they groups attending our matriculate?
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Selection and Placement Formative Improvement Research and Evaluation Accountability College Admissions (Admissions staff) To (Student affairs staff)
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necessary resources to state systems better than What is the level of address any deficiencies others at fostering specific proficiency in intra- and in students' intra- and intra- and interpersonal interpersonal competencies interpersonal competencies competencies among that students in our discipline that are identified during the underrepresented student achieve prior to graduation? semester?
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and ultimately to improve higher education and STEM retention and success. Using Assessment Data to Serve Multiple Purposes As noted above, assessments of intra- and interpersonal competencies may be able to serve the needs of both internal and external stakeholders simultaneously.
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Institutions that have used assessment data internally to strengthen teaching approaches and student learning outcomes have then used these improvements to document for accreditors that they focus sufficiently on learning for accreditation (Mentkowski et al., 2000)
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As a result, they will need a great deal of support, including training in how to interpret and use the data, when provided with assessment data on students' competencies. This challenge is illustrated by a recent national survey in which provosts at 2- and 4-year institutions were asked about assessment of student learning outcomes (Kuh et al., 2014)
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Higher education leaders and administrators will likely need to work with faculty, student affairs staff, and institutional research and assessment experts collectively to (1) identify the competencies that are most germane to the overall institutional mission at large, (2)
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Thus if there were substantial evidence linking the eight intra- and interpersonal competencies described in this report to college success, college administrators could look to incentives, such as changing reward structures, to motivate faculty to adopt such assessment practices. However, the survey by Kuh and colleagues (2014)
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, faculty may view assessment practices as more integral and less burdensome. This literature and other research suggest that college and university leaders and administrators are unlikely to accomplish the goal of using assessment data to support long-term improvement without the active involvement and commitment of multiple stakeholder groups.
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Responding provosts cited as the most prevalent and important supports for assessment explicit institutional policy on assessing student learning, faculty engagement and involvement in assessment, and increased centralized capacity for assessment work. Relatively less prevalent were student participation in assessment activities and significant involvement of student affairs staff.
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Based on individual students' assessment scores, student affairs staff required some students to meet monthly with their advisers to review their success plans and others to meet with their tutors regularly to check on their grades (Fain, 2015)
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engineering college hired a team of researchers (Lattuca et al., 2006) to evaluate the effects of the new criteria on student learning outcomes and educational and organizational policies and practices.
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For the most part, moreover, faculty members did not perceive their assessment efforts to be overly burdensome; nearly 70 percent described their level of effort as "about right." These changes in teaching practices and curriculum improvements appeared to influence student learning outcomes positively. Compared with their 1994 counterparts, and after taking differences in graduates' and institutional characteristics into account, 2004 graduates reported the following: • more active engagement in their own learning, • more interaction with instructors, • more instructor feedback on their work, • more time spent studying abroad, • more international travel, • more involvement in engineering design competitions, and • more emphasis in their programs on openness to diverse ideas and people.
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This use case demonstrates how leaders in higher education can use assessment data in multiple ways to inform multiple stakeholders for several interrelated purposes. The data collected were initially used largely for formative purposes, for improvement -- specifically by the faculty and student affairs staff that were developing and administering the new leadership program.
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RECOMMENDATION 11: Leaders in higher education should select, design, analyze, and interpret data from assessments of intra- and interpersonal competencies based on stakeholder information needs, intended uses, and users. The research literature contains convincing evidence that institutions of higher education can benefit from using assessments for both institutional improvement and accountability purposes, and these uses can ultimately
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From page 150... ...
In the University of New Mexico example, advisers and student affairs staff used assessment data individually with students to tailor support services, while central administrators saw the data as useful for broader strategic initiatives aimed at retaining diverse and underprepared students to graduation. Conclusion: Assessments are more likely to contribute to student reten tion and completion if efforts to use their results involve stakeholders at multiple levels of the organization (e.g., student support services, faculty, diversity officers, administrators)
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Research Needs Research has yielded preliminary evidence of the importance of the eight competencies identified in Chapter 2 to success in college, and case studies of the use of cognitive assessment data by institutions of higher education for purposes of institutional and instructional improvement also are widely available (e.g., Astin, 2012; Blaich and Wise, 2010; Borden and Young, 2008)
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152 SUPPORTING STUDENTS' COLLEGE SUCCESS RECOMMENDATION 12: To broaden understanding of how as sessments of intra- and interpersonal competencies can lead to greater student retention and success, institutions of higher education should study and report on their use of these assessments for improvement purposes (e.g., enhancing student support services, developing under represented students' sense of belonging, improving courses, identifying effective programs)
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