Poor Local College (LC)! Their residential life department is strong, receiving numerous compliments on the staff and programs, maintains a healthy budget, has great facilities, and has won an award for their work. Even with these clear and substantial benefits, LC sees declining numbers in the years to come. With what appears to be a reactive supervisor and a staff whose content with the current operations, it's hard for one person to focus on bettering the future.
We all have barriers that we come across throughout our lives. Assessment, like other things, can seem a bit daunting to create and implement when the walls are up against you. Thankfully, we talked through this chapter in class today because as an aspiring assessor, I found myself a bit overwhelmed.
One of the biggest takeaways that I got from the chapter was in the "nonnegotiable" section. The authors state, "assessment will help departmental leaders shape the future rather than react to it" (445). Before my time in the class, I had seen the use of assessment as the final stage in a project; someone wanting to evaluate how the job was done. And that's it. Now thinking about it, assessment can and should be used more to maximize the strengths and make adjustments to the weaknesses.
The chapter also talks about the challenge of defining the degree to which those who are critical of the service or program should be involved in the assessment process. Looking at the project I am working on, it is hard to involve the conference attendees in the assessment development because many of them will not be present or identifiable until the conference has begun. After taking some time away from the reading and coming up with ideas, I realized that the members of the conference are part of a larger identity group, comprised of students, staff, faculty, and community members. Perhaps by talking with those here at Pacific, on the committee or elsewhere on campus, I may still be including those who have some sort of ownership in this program.
Based on the topic of the conference as well as those attending it, I find qualitative research and reasoning to be more beneficial. From this reading and others that I've done, I've come to the understanding that quantitative research identifies a problem or theme whereas qualitative explains why this problem or theme exists. This identification of the "why" helps those assessing develop a response, hopefully an action towards fixing this problem.
Ultimately, I've decided that while assessment has its barriers and initial struggles to "getting going", any response and evaluation is beneficial. Money, time, stakeholders shouldn't be factors that deter us from doing work. After all, "the value of the experience is in the eye of the beholder" (451).
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