Case Study #11: Academic Assessment Timeline

ISSUE:

Academic disciplines must generally balance the assessment activities of multiple courses throughout the academic year. These activities include planning, execution, evaluation, and implementation phases. To ensure that the tasks do not become unmanageable in any given semester, an overall assessment timeline of activities should be developed to assist faculty and assessment professionals in the administration of all assessment undertakings. A systemized approach to this effort that could be distributed across all disciplines would be beneficial.

SOLUTION:

A workable assessment plan must include a multi-year timeline to ensure that all outcomes can be measured and evaluated within a particular time period. Frequently, this time period is defined by the Program Review cycle. The following image shows a standardized timeline creation tool (also created in Excel) used to develop a discipline’s plan for assessment of course outcomes. The advantage of a standard template format for assessment plans is that, similar to assessment results, the plans can be compiled and summarized at higher institutional levels to look at what the college is intending to accomplish on a yearly basis. Each cell in the timeline is filled in through dropdown boxes that describe generally what the action is for that outcome for any given semester. Once constructed in this visual format, the overall plan can be easily evaluated for feasibility (are there too many actions or not enough actions in any given semester?).