Road Blocks - Proceed with Caution

“Barriers to Effective Assessment” – Bresciani

            The authors in this chapter discuss the barriers that may come when trying to accomplish any form of assessment. The added barriers for those of us in student affairs include: (1) a lack of understanding the student learning and development theory that undergirds their practice; (2) a lack of collaboration within and across their divisions to extend to faculty members; and (3) a disconnect between what the student affairs professionals expect students to be able to know and do, and the manner in which student affairs professionals are actually able to provide the opportunity for the outcome to be realized (p. 136) The second of these three barriers is something that I was faced with in the developing stages of creating my evaluation. On the conference committee, there were multiple people doing many different things that the chair relied solely on them to accomplish their tasks. When it came time to announce and explain the educational sessions that were being offered, the committee member was not present at meetings due to conflicts and other commitments. Not having that information that only this one individual had was extremely frustrating because it halted my work; how would I be able to effectively create an evaluation on our conference sessions when I am not aware of what the sessions are?

            Another area of importance from the chapter is how to manage expectations of what you get from your results. Since Pacific has done this conference multiple times, including paired with a NASPA regional conference; it is hard to have the same or more expectations from conference to conference, in part due to the number of attendees but also due to the trends that the community is facing as each conference comes about. Knowing that the conference is biannual, it is also important to have practical expectations of what to do with the results within the two year time span.