As part of a new segment to our monthly OUE newsletter, we are now excited to highlight some of the great assessment work going on around OUE and provide assessment updates. One important assessment project for OUE and Georgia Tech that is now entering its second year is the LLC Assessment Plan and Assessment Team. This team was led by Kari White, Associate Director for LLCs in Academic Engagement Programs, and consisted of a team of LLC staff (Including Christina Wan from iGniTe and Roberta Berry from the Honors Program) and research and assessment professionals from OUE, Student Life, and Institutional Research and Planning. The group worked together to develop a survey and focus group questions to be used by all GT Living Learning Communities. Both the survey and focus group questions reflected the five overall strategic goals of Living Learning Communities and the individual interests and specializations of each community.
Team members attended workshops on running focus groups and qualitative data analysis. They were then paired with an assessment professional to serve as an assistant moderator for another LLC’s focus group. This process helped them prepare to take the lead on their assessment work for AY19-20.
We asked Kari to describe her experience with this project over the last year:
What have you learned from this process so far?
From the process of developing the toolkit and implementing a new assessment process, I’ve learned that a well-developed and carefully considered plan increases the likelihood of successful execution. From the assessment data, we learned that even when LLCs adopted successful practices from other LLCs, the end result can be quite different.
How have you been able to use this information to improve your program?
When we adopt a practice from one LLC to another, we are using early and often check-ins with students that question expectation vs experience to ensure early intervention and course-correction when necessary.
Were there any challenges you faced with this? If so, how did you manage them?
We faced some challenges with consistency of our implementation across LLCs, some equipment (recording device) malfunctions, and some LLCs had difficulty with student participation. We were able to overcome equipment malfunctions using handwritten notes. We identified strategies in the LLCs that improved student participation in focus groups and the survey and plan to use those strategies across all LLCs this year. To address issues of consistency implementing the assessment, and particularly the focus groups, we focused on writing a thorough assessment plan for each LLC and examined how inconsistencies showed up on the final reports last year. Now that everyone has a better idea of what the end result can provide, they are better equipped to manage the implementation.
As you are repeating this process for this year, what are you doing differently?
I am giving more guidance regarding implementation expectations and providing strategies to overcome last year’s challenges – building in some redundancies and asking LLC staff to share with other LLC staff simple and effective ways they have used last year’s results to make changes. By making the results useful and relevant, I think we have developed even more buy-in to the process.
Kari White, Casey Chaviano, and B Woods (Student Life) were able to present on this process this past October at the IUPUI Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. To view their presentation, click here. To view the LLC Toolkit, click here.
Do you have some exciting or useful assessment work going on in your program? Want to highlight your experience so that others may learn from the work you are doing? Send an email to casey.chaviano@gatech.edu.