Research Project

The Office of Assessment is beginning a research project that focuses on faculty perception regarding the culture of assessment within the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.  A survey will be distributed to the faculty that contains a set of questions accompanied by a Likert scale that establish a baseline for the assessment culture within the college.  The survey will be distributed to faculty electronically using Survey Monkey and will also be available in a paper based format.  The next step will be to implement some type of change that will strengthen the culture of assessment within the college.  It will then be necessary to survey the faculty once again to determine if the change has been effective.  Any ideas regarding what type of change could be implemented? 

The Elusive ‘Culture of Assessment’

Always elusive, never too far away, the ‘Culture of Assessment’ is a general idea that can be tough to define, and even tougher to establish. After attending the AACP (American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy) Annual Meeting this week, I had an interesting conversation with our newly established Interim-Dean, Dr. S. William Zito. As we often do, we began to brainstorm new ways to get faculty on board, and establish the culture of assessment within our institution. He then said something that was outside the box, and made me really think: “Maybe the answer is to stop trying to make the College fit the culture, but instead make the culture fit the College.”

Wow. A simple idea, but one that never really occurred to me. Obviously, the challenge begins with defining this culture, or what we’d really like it to be. The next step becomes trying to figure out what the best way is to mould the culture to fit our faculty and College as a whole. This is our challenge, and hopefully we can make some major progress in the coming year. Either way, if we don’t figure out the best way to get the culture flourishing, assessment will continue to be an uphill battle for us, and anyone else in the same boat.

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