Most accredited institutions of higher learning have an established assessment process for academic and administrative programs. Often seen as compliance driven work, assessment reports are used as evidence of continuous improvement and can be used for budgeting and planning. For offices that support military-affiliated students, assessment requirements should be seen as opportunities to reflect, plan, and grow. This short article provides an overview of what I call the “anatomy” of assessment and suggests four steps any program director could take today to make assessment easier and more useful.

Assessment

Assessment activities provide colleges and universities with a way to show internal and external stakeholders that programs are doing what they promise to do. In academic units, these assessment activities include identifying student learning outcomes and using direct and indirect measures to determine if students are meeting the stated outcome. For administrative units (financial aid, advising, parking, etc.), assessment is usually tied to success outcomes or key performance indicators (KPIs). Assessing the degree to which the unit meets their KPIs against stated goals provides units with data to track improvement, argue for larger budget allocations or more personnel, and plan growth and development.

Most assessment work contains three parts. First, all units engaged in assessment must establish a mission and a set of outcomes. The mission should be inclusive of the unit’s purpose but conservative in length. The mission should reflect the mission of the institution and align with any “parent” division (i.e. Division of Student Affairs). The outcomes should be a natural extension of the mission. In effect, the outcomes are the ways that an office knows it is meeting its mission. Offices serving military-affiliated students will have success outcomes (outcomes related to efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction) but may also have learning outcomes if part of their mission is to educate students in a skill or ability. Secondly, units must choose measures that align with their outcomes.

In practice, the measures are specific ways to determine if an outcome is being achieved. If a unit has an outcome of successfully certifying students for benefit use, measures may include the percentage of eligible students certified by a certain date, the number of errors in the certifying process, or even the time elapsed between debt letter request and payment. To make the measures more meaningful, units should suggest targets (acceptable or aspirational) that they can measure their success against. The third and final part of assessment work includes reporting on each measure, determining if the measure was met or not, and, most importantly, identifying an action that can be taken based on the results of the assessment. If, for example, a measure related to career preparation contained a goal of hosting at least 25 companies committed to hiring veterans, a result of hosting only 20 may result in better recruiting, partnering with career services, or reflecting on the reasonability of the 25-company target.

Application

While most units who serve military-affiliated students comply with institutional requests for assessment reports, it is often dismissed as an exercise in compliance and not an opportunity to reflect, plan, and grow. This can be changed by taking a few steps.

1. Look in your backyard

Chances are that you are collecting some form of data on your students or on your processes already. Thoughtfully considering how this data aligns with your mission and outcomes can turn the work you are already doing into the assessment work you should be doing. Take time now to establish data streams to which you already have access (website traffic, books in a loaner library, etc.) and identify data streams you may want in the future (employment rates, student satisfaction, etc.)

2. Partner with your Office of Institutional Research

Your institution is constantly gathering and managing data on your students. As the primary goal of any unit supporting military-affiliated students is to support them in meeting their educational goals, data on student retention and student graduation rates can be useful. Making friends in the Office of Institutional Research helps to secure this data for your identified community. Additionally, if this data is difficult to retrieve, it may suggest a fixable problem related to how your institution identifies and tracks your students.

3. Partner with your Office of Institutional Effectiveness (Assessment)

While your assessment work should be done for your own unit’s benefit, chances are that the assessment professionals at your institution will want to see evidence that you are doing some form of assessment. Partnering with these colleagues may help you refine how you are measuring certain outcomes and how you are using your assessment data to tell your unit’s story and advocate for the students you serve.

4. Make it sustainable

Assessment, like flossing, is not useful if it is not done regularly. You can make assessment a sustainable activity in your office by identifying graduate students or student workers to help (this also gives students a valuable skill set), building out an assessment strategic plan (not all outcomes must be measured every cycle), and partnering with other units (student affairs or enrollment management, for example) that may share your outcomes.

Most offices that serve military-affiliated students are already doing assessment. They are thinking about their mission, reflecting on the degree to which they meet that mission, and making improvements based on cyclical data. The benefit of better tailored assessment work is that this work can contribute to an institution’s assessment process, clearly articulate why requests for support are being made, and demonstrate to stakeholders how an office is growing in the pursuit of its mission. Once an office has an assessment cadence and establishes a sustainable process, they are destined to find the work useful. Some, I boldly claim, may even find it fun!

Article Topics

Military Friendly Institutions Research on Student Veterans Serving Military in HigherEd Veterans Academic Success

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