The Cycle of Assessment
1. Determine:
- What is your mission statement (if
planning program assessment)?
- What are your activity, course or program goals
and objectives?
- What would you like your assessment to
help you determine in relationship to your goals?
2. Develop: Outcomes statements for each goal or
objective you want to target.
3. Decide:
- Which outcomes will you assess for? At
what points in time?
- What tool (instrument) will be best for
each outcome? (the same tool can be used for several outcomes)
- What criteria will you use to determine
acceptable achievement of each outcome?
1. Carry out the assessment.
2. Gather the data from the assessment.
3. Organize and interpret the data:
what does it tell you about how well your students, course, program, or
institution are performing?
4.
Use the interpretation:
- to report out to external agencies or internal review
processes,
- to recommend (to colleagues, to the campus), or
- to make internal
change.
This may also result in continuing on with
the tool you used, adding additional tools as well as discarding the tool you
used for the assessment. You may also discover the need to gather
additional data.
... and continue the
cycle. The ongoing nature of the assessment process is that you continue
the cycle.
What, if some day or night
a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:
'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once
more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and
gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? --Frederic Nietzsche,
The Gay Science