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

Academic Advising: Leverage Point for Systemic Change Initiatives?

Posted: Nov 29 2017 by

Sean Bridgen
Kansas State University

Sean Bridgen, Pennsylvania State University-New Kensington

I am beginning my sixteenth year as an academic adviser; I have worked at large research universities, a small state college, and a small private college. My experiences and scholarly work have taught me that the day-to-day decisions academic advisers make can have a significant impact on how the university functions. Academic advising is structurally designed to include one on one conversations with students regarding the direction of their education, what their current challenges are, what they have learned, and what they want to learn in the future. As a result of this structure, advisers are uniquely positioned to have in-depth conversations about the university's mission, and why the curriculum is structured the way it is; this unique position can also allow advisers to function as a leverage point for change initiatives. More

Communicating and Collaborating Across Disciplines

Posted: Nov 27 2017 by

Judith Ramaley
Portland State University

Judith Ramaley, Portland State University

Those of us who are working on ways to attract students to the study of STEM fields must design a curriculum that prepares our students to understand and manage complex problems where scientific knowledge interacts with other ways of looking at the world. This means finding ways to work across disciplinary boundaries so that these problems can be studied in their broader social, political and environmental context. Boyd (2016, p. B4) argues that "if we really want to matter, we need to think critically about the questions we ask---and the questions we don't ask---and what influences that distinction." The questions we ask have powerful effects on how we design the curriculum, what we expect of ourselves and our students and how we work together with colleagues in our own department as well as other fields to prepare our graduates to live and work in a changing and uncertain world. More

Beyond the Diversity Status Quo

Posted: Nov 2 2017 by

Stephen Secules
Florida International University

Stephen Secules, University of Georgia

The arc of history is long but it bends towards freedom. - Martin Luther King Jr.

Most of us who work in equity and inclusion have an orientation towards wanting to make progress towards systemic change. There is a shared acknowledgement of past injustice, present struggle, and persistent hope. Consistent with the ASCN, those who work in equity and inclusion in higher education are often seeking long term, sustainable transformations of their institutions.

And yet, higher education institutions also prize stability and can be remarkably slow to change. Equity and inclusion concerns get framed as issues for committees and task forces, which eventually become standing entities rather than forces empowered to make radical change. Diversity work feels at risk to budget cuts and to voicing unpopular truths. Overworked and underfunded, the point people for equity and inclusion in an institution can take up somewhat conservative goals: retaining individuals who are underrepresented in a discipline can turn into a standing effort to at least not lose the little bit of diversity left in the department. Although its proponents are often oriented towards transformation, it can seem like higher educational diversity work is far removed from the work of systemic change.

In my dissertation I made calls for going "Beyond Diversity as Usual" in undergraduate engineering work, using new research approaches and new ways of conceptualizing institutional practice (Secules, 2017a). Here are a few directions from my work and others' that may help move towards systemic change in the institutional diversity landscape: More

How can we help change leaders understand how measurement and data can be used?

Posted: Oct 17 2017 by

David Bressoud
Macalester College

David Bressoud, Macalester College

ASCN Working Group 4: Demonstrating Impact is trying something new. This group's mission is to identify, explain, and disseminate information on metrics that hold the potential to document, foster, accelerate, and communicate systemic change. Good questions are a great way to share and expand knowledge. Each month a question of interest and value to the higher education community will be sent to the working group members. Responses will be collated and posted on the ASCN blog. We hope that this will lead to beneficial collaborations not just among the members of the working group, but also across the network, and will reach the larger higher education community interested in systemic change.

The assumption behind this group is that measurement and data are effective mechanisms for facilitating change. The question for this month has two parts.

How can we help change leaders understand how measurement and data can be used? Can you give an example from your own experience where this has happened?

Below are the first three responses received. Please use comment section to respond to the question and to engage in a discussion about the current responses. If there is a link or citation that you think would be of value to other readers, please include this as well.