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San Diego Mesa College

Assessment

 

Service Area Assessments

Service Area Assessments will vary based on the size of your office and nature of students that you serve.  Staff from the Service Area should meet to define the assessment plan, to discuss the assessment process and timeline, and to make plans to review the assessment once complete.

Some things to consider: 

  • COA recommends that you use multiple measures to obtain richer data that enable you to put greater trust in your final
  • Consider using both qualitative and quantitative assessment

Quantitative methods assign numerical scores to service quality while qualitative methods focus on the quality of the service without assigning a numerical value to them.

  • Departmentally developed measurement tools tend to have tremendous content validity. Work together to develop your own tool, for example a rubric that can be used to track performance improvement over time. You could use it for formative and/or summative assessment.
  • Utilize rubrics in your assessment

A well-developed rubric allows you to give a numerical scores for a qualitative assessments which make the reporting, analysis, and evaluation components much easier.

  • Some of your Student Service outcomes may be better assessed through the use of indirect methods as they can provide immediate feedback to a service. Indirect assessment can also be used in combination with direct assessment and may help you to interpret the results or effectiveness of the direct
  • To increase efficiency, you can randomly sample students rather than test everyone, but make sure that you obtain enough data to trust your outcomes and

If several tools are used in a Student Services assessment, for example a student survey and a direct assessment, the staff should ensure that each uses the same or a similar prompt so  there is consistency in the questions that respondents are asked to address in relation to the course learning outcomes.

  • Need a survey, having trouble interpreting results, use your Research Office --they are there for you!


Last Updated: May 25, 2017
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