Alumni Communication

The Office of Assessment maintains a database with alumni contact information such as telephone numbers, email addresses and home addresses.  This information is used to contact alumni regarding upcoming events, surveys, and CE programs.  The ultimate goal is to improve and foster alumni relations within the College.  This alumni database contains information for 558 students and dates back to 2009.  Facebook and Twitter are used as tools to maintain a relationship with alumni and communicate pertinent news and information regarding the College.   These social media sites are also used to communicate with current students.  There is a NAPLEX and PANCE review question posted on Facebook each week to help current students review for these exams.  The student who chooses the correct answer receives a prize.  The Office of Assessment is continuously thinking of new ways to better communicate with alumni and current students.  

Our Culture of Assessment Progress with Students

We are currently in the throes of rolling out several parts of our ongoing efforts to improve our culture of assessment within the College in terms of student involvement. As we are moving forward with each of the following parts of this process, I think we are starting to see a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully, students will begin to not only understand assessment, but embrace it.

1. Culture Surveys – We are now rolling out Step 2 of our Culture of Assessment Surveys. First, we interviewed faculty on the culture of assessment, and found that faculty were simply unaware of the student body’s understanding and thoughts on assessment. Because of this, we decided to survey all students in the College on the assessment culture. This survey is currently running, and hopefully, we can garner some ideas concerning the best ways to improve the assessment process, and what students think about it.

2. Assessment Workshops – We are having our first Assessment Workshop for students next week. The first workshop will be only for Physician Assistant, Clinical Laboratory Sciences and Radiologic Sciences majors. Focusing on only these programs and how assessment fits in, the Office of Assessment along with the appropriate program directors will discuss with students what we are doing in assessment and what we are planning to do next in regard to their programs.

3. An Assessment Campaign – We are creating posters to be put up in our College’s two locations, in an effort to draw student attention to the assessment process. Our goal remains at this point, to make them aware that we need their help when it comes to feedback and surveys. The short term goal of this process is overall higher survey response rates, while the more long-term goal is fostering the culture.

We are hopeful that the assessment culture will continue to grow, and that these three ideas currently being rolled out will help. There are many more things that can be done, and several in  the conversation now. Hopefully, we can become more involved in this area, and bring students further into the fold. The idea is that by the time they get here:

…they will have not only participated in our Assessment practices, but will have embraced the process as intrinsic to not only our success, but their professional development as well.

Assessment Campaign – Health Sciences Program

We have been striving for a better response rate on our didactic surveys that are sent out through survey monkey.

As a team – can we discuss the idea of starting an assessment campaign here at the Bartilucci center. We can create posters and hang them up in the classrooms and hall ways promoting the surveys – sponser a lunch for the students to learn more about the surveys that are distributed from our office. (these are some ideas)

Most of the surveys are sent out to the Physician Assistant students at this time – but in the near future, Rad Sci and CLS will be joining on and I think it’s important to involve all of the students here in understanding the importance of their feedback.

From a professional stand point, they will be moving into careers that are subject to patient satisfaction surveys regarding their performance on a blind basis, some of the students on rotations already come back and say how they now understand how important the data from a survey can be, and how it can make a difference.

heres an idea:

Thanks – Pam

Closing the Loop

This is one of those typical assessment terms or phrases that is a continuous thorn in our sides. Sometimes, as ‘assessment people’ we are in a constant circle of asking for data or information and getting the run-around. There have to be new/fresh ways to close the loop on assessment. How can we go about getting a better handle on who is responsible for specific items, and when they should be done? We have a preliminary ‘document manifest’ system in place, but we are really wondering how other schools manage this. We’ve tried the wiki system, but could not muster up faculty participation. How is everyone else handling this? 

Organizing The Blog

One of the little things that bother me is the the word “categorized”. It screams out for cleaning, for updating, for fixing. But so often when I sit down to write down the global categories and cloud of tags that will serve as teh outline and backbone of a long term project I think…

nothing, total blank

So I have developed a strategy for this. I wait, twitchily, but wait and see what develops. After a few posts I go and look over the direction that things are going in and then try to document those global directions. These big directions, they are the categories. Big containers that hold the concepts we want to discus.

The smaller bits that are buried within the posts, they get tags so that we can find those things again, breadcrumbs if you will. These I steal from others. My first swipe at tags for this blog come from Carnegie Mellon Site here.

The Assessment Grid

After browsing the websites of some Pharmacy schools, I came across an Assessment Grid being utilized by the Rutgers Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. It turns out to be a very reader-friendly way of communicating the ongoing Assessment Plan within the college, and gives the reader some background and a fair amount of detail on the assessment process. It would be great to hear how this grid was developed. Was there a committee that developed it? Or was it just written by a Dean/Associate Dean for Assessment? It’s similar to our ‘matrix’ of outcomes and goals, but less formal, and more readable.