With your last assessment project done, it is time to begin planning the next. At this point, you may wish to reflect on your accomplishments and think about where to go next. In assessment, as in most investigation, one set of answers often suggests the next set of questions. Your departmental assessment team can review your work to date, considering any new information you gained from it and whether your assessment results so far change your assessment plans for the future. You may decide, for example, that you want to supplement your work sample assessment with a survey or focus group next year to get a better understanding of what motivates student success in your program. Or you may find that an end-of-program assessment revealed unforeseen insights that you wish to explore more fully. In this case, you would adapt this assessment to focus in greater detail on areas of interest. Or perhaps you will decide to use the tools you developed this year to assess a different course or course sequence next year, providing a comparison between various points in the curriculum.
You may find it a useful exercise to review Steps One through Six of your completed assessment project. You might consider the following general questions:
Are we satisfied with our learning objectives and our overall assessment plan?
Are there new assessment questions we want to consider?
What do we need to do to be ready to begin our next assessment project?
What resources do we need?
How can the CAE help us?
Click here for more detailed review questions about each step in the assessment cycle.
