Administrative Support Assessment

Administrative-Support Assessment Procedure

Spring Hill College assesses every administrative-support program (e.g., Campus Ministry, CASA, Financial Aid, Residence Life) every year according to the following schedule.

An "academic year" is understood to run from 1 July to 30 June. You may consider this to be interchangeable with a fiscal year that ends on 30 June.

Each program designates an Assessment Liaison (or more than one) whose job it is to communicate with Institutional Review and Assessment in submitting these documents. However, assessment is a program-wide process, and it is the responsibility of the entire program to ensure accurate and timely assessment.

Assessment Schedule

For the 2024–2025 academic year, the following information is due on 15 September:

You may also attach supporting files such as raw data, rubrics, or tables. You may label these files with "Supporting"; please see below.

For the 2025–2026 academic year, that information is due on 1 June.

For example:

After 2025, we will return to the 15 September due date.

Current Status

In order to be up to date, your program should ensure that it has Intended Outcomes and Assessment Plan submitted for the 2024–2025 academic year.

Submission Guidelines

You will upload your file(s) to designated Google Drive folders, as described below.

After you upload your file(s), please send a quick email to Tom Metcalf at tmetcalf@shc.edu to let him know that you added file(s).

Please title your PDF file in the following format:

Examples:

You should already have access to your programs's folder, but if not, please let tmetcalf@shc.edu know. Here are the links to the folders:

General Guidelines for Program Assessment

Spring Hill College follows a yearly assessment cycle.

If you want general information about the College's students and courses, on which to potentially base assessment plans and analyses, please see here.

For the Current Academic Year: Identify Outcomes and Assessment Plan

1. Identify Outcomes

Identify 2–5 intended outcomes for your administrative-support program.

Base these on your program's mission and the content of its job descriptions.

Ideally, outcomes are stated in a way that explicitly mentions by when the outcome will occur and how it will be demonstrated to have occurred. You may wish to state your outcomes in this form:

"By the end of the fiscal year,  the Azalea Department will have

Notice that these outcomes specify a measurable outcome, how it will be measured, and by when it will be achieved. Notice that they are not limited to simply reporting what your program intends to do, because success is best-measured by how it is demonstrated. Notice also that some outcomes can be specific tasks intended for a certain fiscal or academic year, while others can be ongoing.

You may wish to consult Bloom's Taxonomy for ideas of actions that employees, students, or other stakeholders will take in achieving these outcomes.

You should consider several ways of measuring outcomes, including measures external to SHC operations. For example, you might be able to track students' placement rates in jobs or graduate school, or survey alumni. For more on measurement, proceed to the next step.

Ideally, at this point, cite your previous year's Continuous-Improvement Plan and explain how your program has begun implementing it.

2. Assessment Plan

Explain in detail how your program will measure whether and the degree to which its stakeholders will achieve those outcomes. If you crafted your outcomes according to the advice above, then this should be straightforward. You can mention specific projects or measures.

As noted in the previous step's description, it's ideal to include a mixture of internal and external measures.

It is also ideal to include a mixture of formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments are applied during the processes, typically within an academic or fiscal year's operations, such that employees can use that feedback to improve their performance during the year. Summative assessments are applied after the task is complete, to some instrument or product that the student has produced. For more information, you can consult various sources on the Internet.

Another important strategy is to include both direct and indirect assessments.

Direct assessments are from demonstrations of employees' or students' progress from samples of employee or student work.

Indirect assessments are not from direct demonstration, but instead, from evaluation or reflection about the employees' or other stakeholders' skills or knowledge (or direct demonstrations thereof); these might include supervisor's evaluations or employee self-evaluations, or surveys about performance of the employees in your unit.  For more information, there are various useful sources on the Internet.

Ideally, include rubrics to help assessors ascertain the degree to which stakeholders meet the outcomes. Investing time now in rubrics will make actual assessment easier, especially when it comes time to write your Analysis—see next step.

As with your Intended Outcomes, ideally, explain how the assessment plan you will be using is compatible with implementation of your Continuous-Improvement Plan.

For the Preceding Academic Year: Analysis and Continuous-Improvement Plan

3. Analysis

At this step, your program's employees consider the results delivered by the measurements mentioned in the previous step. If you used rubrics, then it's relatively easy to get started with your analysis. Your employees' performance according to the rubrics helps tell you the degree to which your program's employees or students served are achieving their outcomes—which, in turn, tells you the degree to which your program is achieving its mission.

Explain whether your program followed its previous year's Continuous-Improvement Plan. If it didn't, explain why not.

Provide a discussion of whether and when your employees, students, or other stakeholders achieved the outcomes, and to what degree. If they achieved an outcome with high-quality performance, say so, and briefly suggest an explanation or explanations for why they did so. This explanation may include following the previous year's Continuous-Improvement Plan. If they did not achieve some outcomes, provide some informed speculation about why they did not achieve the outcomes. As before, you should try to cite the degree to which your program followed the previous year's Continuous-Improvement Plan, and whether following it had any effect on the degree to which your program's employees, students served, or other stakeholders achieved their outcomes.

Whether your students achieved the outcomes, use your information to begin thinking about how to improve your program, which you will detail in the next step: the Continuous-Improvement Plan.

Please note: During your submission for this step, you should submit file(s) for your raw data.  These may include financial reports, tables of counts of students served, and so on.

4. Continuous-Improvement Plan

Now that your program has had time to develop, inspect, and digest its Analysis, your program's employees can collaborate to compose a Continuous-Improvement Plan.

If your program is generally achieving its mission (and its employees, students served, and other stakeholders are generally achieving the intended outcomes), include in your plan how you will continue to implement your successful strategies. Even if your stakeholders are performing well, think carefully about your program's mission and decide how you can further improve the degree to which the mission is accomplished. You may at least wish to identify a new outcome or modify an existing one, or develop a new rubric.

If your program is generally not achieving its mission, or your stakeholders are not generally achieving the intended outcomes, including in your plan what you will change in order to improve their performance, or if the problems are chiefly external (i.e., outside your program's control), explain how you will nevertheless mitigate them, or otherwise better-prepare your stakeholders to achieve your program's intended outcomes.

Now is also a point at which you may consider changing your intended outcomes or your assessment plan, which you can document and explain here, and you will implement in the next round of intended outcomes—see Step 1 above.


For More Information

Please consult with your Faculty Director of Institutional Research, Thomas Metcalf, at tmetcalf@shc.edu.

Official Listing of Credential Programs

Please consult the Bulletin's "Summary Listing of Academic Programs." The Bulletin may be found in the Registrar section of Badgerweb.

Program-Assessment Progress

To view your division's progress and completed submissions, please find the corresponding link to your division's subfolders, and inspect the contents of the subfolders.