How can you encourage assessment and evaluation in your academic community?

2 Involve your stakeholders

The second step to encourage assessment and evaluation is to involve your stakeholders in the design, implementation, and use of these processes. Your stakeholders include your students, faculty, staff, administrators, and external partners, such as employers, accreditation bodies, or funding agencies. By involving your stakeholders, you can ensure that your assessment and evaluation activities are relevant, meaningful, and responsive to their needs and expectations. You can also foster a sense of ownership, engagement, and accountability among your academic community.

3 Provide training and support

The third step to encourage assessment and evaluation is to provide training and support for your academic community to develop their assessment and evaluation skills and competencies. This can include offering workshops, seminars, webinars, mentoring, coaching, or peer review sessions on topics such as assessment design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, reporting, or dissemination. You can also provide resources, tools, templates, guidelines, or examples of good practices to help your academic community to conduct assessment and evaluation effectively and ethically.

4 Celebrate and reward

The fourth step to encourage assessment and evaluation is to celebrate and reward your academic community for their achievements and contributions in these processes. This can include acknowledging, recognizing, or showcasing their assessment and evaluation projects, findings, or recommendations in newsletters, websites, social media, or events. You can also provide incentives, such as certificates, badges, grants, or awards, to motivate your academic community to participate in or lead assessment and evaluation initiatives.

5 Use and share

The fifth step to encourage assessment and evaluation is to use and share the results and insights from these processes to inform decision-making, improvement, or innovation in your academic context. This can include using the data and evidence from your assessment and evaluation activities to identify strengths, gaps, or opportunities for enhancing your teaching and learning practices, programs, or policies. You can also share your assessment and evaluation findings or recommendations with your stakeholders, such as students, faculty, staff, administrators, or external partners, to solicit feedback, collaboration, or support.

6 Reflect and improve

The sixth step to encourage assessment and evaluation is to reflect and improve on your own assessment and evaluation processes and practices. This can include soliciting feedback from your academic community or stakeholders on how they perceive or experience your assessment and evaluation activities, as well as reviewing your own goals, purposes, methods, or outcomes. You can also compare your assessment and evaluation results or practices with benchmarks, standards, or best practices in your field or discipline. By reflecting and improving, you can enhance the quality and impact of your assessment and evaluation efforts.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?