HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

This guide was created by the Director of Assessment and the Academic Assessment Committee in 2012 to give guidance to programs at UCA as they create and update their assessment plans. When the Higher Learning Commission visited the campus in 2010, one of their critiques was that we did not have a culture of assessment including the absence of an assessment handbook, nor was anyone monitoring the procedures and processes of reviewing assessment plans. In response, a full-time Director of Assessment position was created and the existing Academic Planning and Assessment Committee was given a new charge and name: the Academic Assessment Committee. Together they were tasked with creating an assessment handbook, helping programs improve their assessment plans, and being the body that would receive and give feedback on assessment results.

This guide will walk you through the assessment process broken down into steps with links that will give you definitions and additional resources. Since assessment has a long history at this point, in some cases we are going to use or link to assessment resources at other colleges and universities that we found particularly helpful as we were creating this guide. The result, we hope, is user friendly, flexible to meet the needs of both assessment beginners and veterans, and utilizes some of the expertise of institutions who have a longer history of assessment.

If you are doing this for the first time, start at step 1. You can go directly to whatever stage of the process you would need on later visits.