Part 4: Department and Administrative Responsibilities

Chairs are not the people primarily responsible for leading departmental assessment--all department faculty need to be regularly involved in conversations about assessment. These conversations can take place during regular department meetings, annual or semi-annual department retreats, and additional workshops throughout the year. To this end, we urge every Department to assign one or more faculty members to work as Department Assessment Coordinators in order to address the following:

• Work with chair and department to schedule and conduct meetings where departmental assessment activities are generated, implemented, and reviewed
• Work with Chair and Institutional Research to update information into WEAVE at the end of every semester, keeping the dept abreast of ongoing assessment projects
• Update departmental assessment initiatives on a Departmental Assessment webpage every semester
• Work with dept to ensure that webpages are up to date (including faculty bios), and that necessary new content is being created; submit changes to be made to secretary (who will have already been trained in publishing to website)
• Annually facilitate departmental review of language in bulletin (hard copy and online) pertaining to the dept and its courses, consulting dept colleagues to ensure accuracy and working with Department secretary to post changes to website if and when necessary. 

Likewise, the administration values honest feedback in departmental reporting. We recognize that the purpose of assessment is not for departments and programs to sing their praises, but rather to accurately and candidly reflect upon where things are working and where they can be improved. It is better for a program to report that its learning outcomes are below its targets, and is consequently pursuing an action plan aimed at increasing those targets, than for a program to report that all is well and no subsequent action plans are in effect. Also, the administration recognizes that the hard work faculty put into assessment cannot go ignored. Annual assessment reports need to be responded to and acted upon, not left forgotten in an online database.

 
      Our goals:

• Impress upon faculty the need to regularly document their department’s various assessment initiatives online for everyone to see—colleagues, students, accreditation agencies, and other stakeholders.
• Involve faculty directly in the ongoing maintenance and design of their department’s web pages—which are nothing less than the most public face of their department.
• Make assessment engaging and inviting—to help faculty realize that many conversations about assessment are inherently conversations about values, knowledge, critical thinking, and many of the very attributes that led faculty into the profession of teaching in the first place.
• Ensure that the administration values honest reporting, and supports departments in following through on action plans when possible.