FAQ & Glossary

Program and institutional assessment are important for the same reason that faculty and staff perform classroom and office assessment on an everyday basis: it provides us with information we can use to improve student learning and our performance as instructors and staff. And it is important to bear that fact in mind: we all already perform assessment constantly on a small scale. When we talk about program or institutional assessment, we are merely widening the scope of our assessment practices to find ways of improving student learning at the level of programs or of the entire university. Yes, our accrediting body (the Higher Learning Commission) requires us to do assessment, but our first obligation is to ourselves and our institution. By consistently practicing program and institutional assessment and recording our efforts, any accreditation expectations will take care of themselves. Our focus should always be on what will best serve our students at Lindenwood.

This is a very common question about assessment. To answer it briefly, grades are a form of assessment, but they vary too much across courses, sections, and instructors to be a very reliable indicator of student achievement. Also, grades reflect, foremost, student achievement of specific course objectives, and course objectives are rarely a perfect reflection of program objectives, let alone institutional objectives. Other methods of assessment are therefore necessary to provide greater clarity about whether students are achieving these objectives, and to what degree.

Put simply, assessment cannot take place without widespread faculty involvement. The last step in any assessment process–the step that gives the whole process meaning–is the implementation of changes in the classroom to improve student learning, which only faculty can do. But the entire assessment process also benefits from faculty involvement. Back in the 1980s and 90s, assessment was often driven by administrators or by forces external to the academy. Unsurprisingly, under those circumstances faculty tended to resent assessment as an artificial imposition on their work. Contemporary assessment best practices emphasize the need for assessment to grow organically out of the work that faculty already do, and for assessment goals and practices to be developed and owned by the faculty themselves. Done well, assessment continues in a larger forum the work faculty already do to assess learning in the classroom.

While faculty contact with students occurs primarily in the classroom, staff can help provide a more holistic sense of student learning and development due to the variety of positions of support and oversight they occupy. Staff who do not interact with students still contribute to assessment by seeking to improve the functionality and efficiency of the university.

Lindenwood conducts a number of surveys of students and alumni, including the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the Student Satisfaction Survey (SSI), and the First Destination Survey. Details about the kinds of data collected by each of these surveys (and how to access that data) are available on the Institutional Surveys, Data, and Reports page of this website.