Our collective experience as academics has led us to fear that departmental assessment plans will just sit on some anonymous shelf; our hard work will disappear into the black hole of administrative demands; and the lack of university response will become one more chip on our faculty's shoulders as yet another example of wasted effort. The question thus facing the departmental chair is: How do we ensure that our work benefits our programs? In other words, how do we make mandated assessment plans meaningful?
Establishing Departmental “Buy-In”
It is clear from the assessment literature that there is no single way to create a good assessment plan. The process and structure should reflect the needs and idiosyncrasies of both institutional and departmental communities. Such factors as the percentage of tenured versus non-tenured faculty members in the department, the balance between recent hires accustomed to assessment and more cynical faculty members who have been through multiple university strategic planning cycles, and whether the university has a culture of assessment inform the strategies the chair must utilize in implementing assessment plans. For example, if a university or college has a culture of non-assessment—forms are filled out, reports are filed, but decisions still appear to be arbitrary and not based on the aforementioned reports—a department chair should not pressure her department to comply with assessment with the justification that the department will receive external benefits. This approach, on the other hand, would be very effective in a university with a culture of assessment, where well-implemented assessment plans result in additional faculty lines and departmental resources.
One way of garnering departmental investment in these programs is to demonstrate to faculty how they can benefit from assessment. However, every department will differ as to their triggering issues (AAHE 1992). For example, members of a department may be curious to discover why their students are not going to law school as frequently as in the past. To answer this question they consider LSAT score and matriculation patterns, review the performance of their majors compared to other majors in the university, analyze contributing alterations in the department over the years, and determine how their program differs from others that appear to be more successful. These findings allow them to make adjustments designed to improve the success rates of their students' law school applications. In other political science departments, the salient issue may be to improve the caliber of graduate students entering the program or enhance students' ability to serve as competent research assistants. Regardless of the issue, the key is to find an assessment outcome in which faculty members are invested.
A second approach is to give individuals responsibility for reviewing and analyzing one element of the raw data collected for program review (e.g., one writes a brief report scrutinizing the results of a majors survey, another examines publication patterns of the department relative to student credit hours generated). In undergraduate programs, it is useful to integrate some of the survey development and interpretation into methods (and other) courses. This lightens the load on the faculty, provides practical experience for the students, and engages students in the process of assessment. This process may, in some institutions, be of similar value with graduate students.
The key to establishing buy-in is leadership from the departmental chair. The chair must see the potential of assessment in improving quality teaching, research outcomes, and student engagement, as well as departmental quality—regardless of the administrative response. If the chair does not see the transformative potential of assessment, it will be very difficult to convince the department.
Importance of Connections with Administration
Similarly, it is important to encourage university officials to commit to the change and potential of the department (AAHE 1992; Banta et al. 1996; Palomba and Banta 1999). By building bridges to different administrative offices and illustrating departmental support for university objectives (increasing enrollment, meeting financial need, assessing programs), administrators will be more willing to work with the department to solve these problems. The initiative for change then rests on the department to find a solution that meets departmental needs, as opposed to having solutions pressed upon faculty by administrators. One example we all face is the pressure for accreditation self-study in the years immediately prior to the evaluation. When the administration-driven assessment push begins on campus, the wise department will have already done this in a fashion that helped the political science program. This department is less likely to be subjected to a “cookie-cutter,” “one-size-fits-all” approach to assessment.
After the assessment process, the department will have the evidence necessary to assist in the increasingly data-driven decision making of administrators. For example, departments can demonstrate the comparative inexpensiveness of political science by highlighting higher student satisfaction ratings on national surveys by political science majors, or of the department's intellectual rigor through the positive impact of political science courses on the university's critical thinking objectives. In times of budget shortfalls and belt-tightening, this documented evidence may assist the department more than all the self-professed claims of “rigor” and “excellence” (which hopefully they can now demonstrate).
Closing the Feedback Loop: Change Based on Assessment
Assessment helps very little if the information does not influence decision-making processes or determinations. Carefully developed reports that reside in a binder have no real impact, are of limited value, and are wasteful. However, even if no one outside of the department examines the data, the department can benefit if it learns from the assessment process and discusses its findings. The department (and the chair) must be committed to using the assessment findings to impact the graduate or undergraduate curriculum, departmental policies, or other aspects of departmental life. Assessment can improve the way we work. Its findings should inform future departmental decisions and encourage faculty to bring the same inquiring mind to their teaching and university life as they do to their research. If, annually, the department discusses what has been discovered through assessment and plans the alterations to be made in response, than the assessment process will have been leveraged for the good of the department, not for the external audiences that may have compelled it.
