Leadership ID Assessment

Learning domains: Assessment & Evaluation, Leadership, and Social Justice & Advocacy

Description: In EDAD 510, I worked on an assessment project with several other students. We assessed the Impact Matters workshop of Leadership ID which is the second installment in Student Life and Leadership’s Emerging Leaders Program and compared it to when this workshop was facilitated to students in the Male Success Initiative (MSI). Assessing this project allowed us to understand whether students were meeting the learning and program outcomes. Our assessment looked specifically at whether gender, year, race/ethnicity, and delivery method impacted student learning and compared the results from Leadership ID and the MSI event.

Term: Spring 2018

Learning Outcomes:

1. SWiBAT develop appropriate assessment questions that relate to Leadership ID’s student learning outcomes.

2. SWiBAT assess program effectiveness and provide recommendations for future leadership programs.

Assessment Rubric - Please click image to view PDF.

Reflection

I would rate myself as advanced for SLO #1 because I developed various types of assessment questions and received feedback from student affairs professionals. For example, I created multiple questions that met each student learning outcome. Because Leadership ID took place in Student Life and Leadership, I asked for feedback from my supervisor and the associate director of the department. They assisted me with clarifying some of the questions that I created, so that they were more aligned with the student learning outcomes we developed. Additionally, they were able to help with the Likert Scale questions and help me determine whether or not we should keep the neutral section.

I would rate myself as competent for SLO #2 because my team assessed the program effectiveness and developed recommendations that had an justice and equity mindset. Overall, the learning outcomes were met for Impact Matters because we set effectiveness/criteria to be met at 80% and on average, the measures were above that percentage. There were negligible differences when comparing the means from Impact Matters facilitated during Leadership ID and Impact Matters presented to MSI. There was a slight difference in MSI participants believing that they “have a better understanding of the connection of culture to history and current events” when compared to Leadership ID. Although we cannot determine significance and it may be random, perhaps the MSI students were better engaged and could draw more connections to their own culture because of the intentionality of previous MSI events. However, Leadership ID participants had a better understanding of how “not to appropriate other cultures.” We speculate that this occurred because participants were from a wide range of colleges/majors and may have not have previous opportunities to learn about cultural appropriation, so they may have had more to learn than MSI participants where these topics are commonly incorporated into the curriculum.

For both Leadership ID and MSI, there was not a meaningful difference in how the qualitative questions were reported. The majority of participants from both workshops were able to “identify a historical or current event that is an example of cultural appropriation” so they received a 2 automatically for identifying an event. Because there were more complexity with the second qualitative question about actionable steps to check for appropriation participants from both groups reported good, but not excellent responses.

Several recommendations for Impact Matters include clarifying learning outcomes, so that more relevant assessment questions can be asked. For example, instead of “participants will be able to gain a better understanding of cultural appropriation, how to identify it, and potential ways to respond” we could have an objective that focuses on describing or defining appropriation to begin with since “understanding” can be vague. Additionally, we had several open ended questions that asked students to identify an example of appropriation, but responses could have been more thorough, therefore, future workshops can discuss the harms of appropriation in addition to examples. Additionally, Schuh et. al (2016) discuss how it is important to use assessment results for improvement, so our group discussed results with Dr. Joy Hoffman, Director of DIRC, because of the collaboration between Student Life and DIRC. During this conversation, other recommendations included tailoring workshops to specific audiences, creating a scale that measures workshops based on perceived difficulty level of content, and partnering with University 101 classes to expose students to this content early on in their academic careers.

Evidence

Please click "evidence" to open a PDF of a sampling of the project.

Reference

Schuh, J. H., Biddix, J. P., Dean, L. A., & Kinzie, J. (2016). Assessment in Student Affairs. John Wiley & Sons.