10 Important Reasons for Planning and Conducting Outcomes Assessment in Organizations of Higher Education

Robert DiTomasso, Ph.D.

1. Failing to plan is planning to fail
    
You need to know how what you are doing in your educational programs relates to what you expect to produce in your students.  Otherwise, the educational activities are then a series of disconnected unrelated activities without a common theme or thread that binds them together.  Assessment data are the threads.

2. It's better to know than assume

Outcomes assessment is a public declaration and commitment to knowing. It's a sign that we care and are serious about what we are doing. We strive to know what we are achieving in our programs rather than simply assume.

 3.       Absence of evidence is evidence of absence in this case

Absence of a plan that specifies mechanisms for providing evidence is essentially equivalent to no evidence-if evidence is not sought for all intents and purposes it simply does not exist

4.       If you don’t ask the important questions, someone else surely will

It’s essential to determine:

What are the critical questions you need to ask?

What are the critical means of answering these questions?

What type of evidence is the most compelling that can be obtained?

What would be most the most convincing demonstration that goal attainment has indeed occurred?

5.       The best defense is a good offense

The idea here is to be proactive rather than reactive.  Most programs are probably already collecting a good amount of data but may not have systematically examined it. Only the strong survive!

The health of an institution and its programs depends on regular check-ups  and well-informed mechanisms for fostering change.  Outcomes assessment provides an appropriate review of systems and a solid basis for decision-making.

Outcomes assessment is on-going and not just an activity we do for accreditation purposes. 

   

6.       Some questions may never be truly answered without resorting to data

Both quantitative and qualitative measures are important methods for discovering what you need to know.  When multiple sources of data all point in the same direction, we are more confident that what we are doing is working, ie, truly having an intended impact.

7.       To ask is to know

The only dumb question is the one that is never asked and this never rings more truly than here.  We will never know what we need  to know unless we question what we are doing.

8.        There is strength in numbers

There is truly no substitute for reliable and valid data in improving and strengthening our programs.  We must try to be certain that our measures are indeed measuring what we say they are and that these measures yield consistent and stable  scores for making comparisons.

9.        Information is power

While knowledge is necessary but not sufficient for change, it is a powerful tool for pinpointing areas in need of improvement.  To capitalize on its value, we must utilize it by populating feedback loops with useful information that will drive decisions.

10.   Adopt a culture of assessment

We can achieve our goals by fostering and nurturing a culture of assessment. In this culture, we emphasize the importance of asking relevant questions, developing systems for streaming data, interpreting data, and using data to support and change what we do in order to improve quality.