How Do We Convince Administrators that Program Assessment is Worth the Effort?

Posted: Dec 5 2017 by

Archie Holmes
University of Virginia-Main Campus

Archie Holmes, University of Virginia

In November ASCN Working Group 4: Demonstrating Impact leaders selected a question submitted by the registrants for the ASCN Webinar titled "Launching and Leading Change in STEM Education" - Effective program assessment is hard. How do we convince administrators that it is worth the effort? We thought this question would be of interest to the larger higher education community and asked members of working group 4 to respond to this question.

Share below in the comment section how you are addressing this question at your institution, or to engage in a discussion. In addition, if there are any questions you would like us to address in the coming months, please share them here or email them to Inese, the ASCN Project Manager.

Effective program assessment is hard. How do we convince administrators that it is worth the effort? More

Reflections on the SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion

Posted: Jul 13 2017 by

Inese Berzina-Pitcher
Western Michigan University

Inese Berzina-Pitcher

Last month in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) we organized SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion.

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One of the major objectives of the workshop was to advance a dialog on diversity and inclusion in undergraduate STEM education between practitioners transforming institutions and researchers who are studying systemic change at higher education institutions.

The workshop featured case studies of institutions that are making progress on increasing diversity and inclusion on their campuses. These case studies were used to stimulate small group discussion amongst all participants on what is working or not on their campuses. In addition, small group discussion by ASCN working groups also were offered.

With a great interest we read reflections offered by the workshop participants and in turn More

What advice about the use of measurement would you give to a department chair?

Posted: Jun 9 2017 by

Pamela Brown
CUNY New York City College of Technology

Pamela Brown

I was invited to participate in the Accelerating Systematic Change Network (ASCN) Workshop, held at the HHMI in the summer of 2016 and have since continued collaborating with Working Group 4, with the goal of shedding light on using data to drive change – identifying, explicating and disseminating sources of information. I have served as the Associate Provost at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, a minority serving, public, urban college, for the last 5 years, after having served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences for 6 years. Following are my responses to the guiding questions forwarded by the working group's leadership. More

Writing a proposal? Here are some great resources from ASCN!

Posted: Dec 19 2016 by

Stephanie Chasteen
University of Colorado at Boulder

Stephanie Chasteen

For many of us, it's proposal writing season. If you are submitting an NSF-IUSE proposal, there are increasing expectations that the proposal will include a theory of change for how the project aims to achieve its outcomes, and a well-developed evaluation plan for assessing progress toward those outcomes. As an evaluator, I am often asked to help people flesh out these objectives and metrics, and I have found several of the resources on the ASCN site very useful. I was lucky enough to be helping out with the ASCN project when these resources came in, and acted as a temporary librarian to create the list of resources on the site, and so am quite familiar with the breadth of resources. This blog post is to point you toward some of my favorites that have been useful when writing a proposal aimed at institutional change. More

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