Want Campus Buy-In For Your Assessment Efforts?
Find Out What's Important to Your Faculty Members and Involve Them Throughout the Process
By Raymond J. Rodrigues

From the September 2002 AAHEBulletin.com

At your next assessment conference or off-campus meeting, strike up a conversation with a colleague from another campus and see how long it takes for the topic to move to the difficulty of convincing faculty members that assessment is worth their time and effort.

In my conversations with assessment peers I've discovered that no matter what type of campuses we come from, we all report hearing the same faculty concerns and complaints:

• "We give grades, don't we? That's assessment. Isn't that enough?" 
• "We don't have enough time to start another new project." 
• "'Outcomes,' 'Goals,' 'Objectives' - all this is educational jargon!" 
• "Isn't this another way of evaluating us, of finding fault with our work?" 
• "Find a standardized test or something, and move on to more important things." 
• "You want us to lower standards? Have us give more A's and B's?" 
• "Our goals can't be quantified like some industrial process." 
• "Let's just wait until the (board chair, president, provost, etc.) leaves, and it'll go away." 

It might be tempting to ignore these comments but doing so could undermine your assessment efforts. Getting all (or at least most) faculty members - not just those involved in assessment but everyone on campus - to understand the importance of assessment and to support its implementation is the key to successful assessment efforts. 

So how do you get faculty members to buy-in to and participate in your assessment work? You have to understand your campus culture and engage faculty members in ways that will reflect and recognize what they value.

And what do faculty members value? I asked a group of colleagues at the recent AAHE Assessment Conference to help me come up with the following list:

• Their discipline (sometimes even more than their institution) 
• Teaching 
• Student achievement 
• Collegiality 
• Being treated as professionals 
• Recognition of their efforts 
• Time for research 
• Time for all their work 
• Faculty governance 
• Their disciplinary authority as recognized by their peers 
• Recognition of the quality of their departments 
• Faculty rights and prerogatives 

What Faculty Members Value

By understanding what faculty members value and relating assessment to those things, assessment leaders can begin to develop plans that will more likely result in successful assessment efforts.

For example, if the faculty governance process is important to your faculty, can assessment be integrated into that process? Is there a committee charged with overseeing and monitoring assessment practices? Do faculty policies and procedures recognize assessment?

It's also important to find ways to encourage department faculty to recognize faculty members' assessment accomplishments within department governance structures as well as in tenure, promotion, and merit standards.

Campus-based planning and faculty participation in that planning is also highly valued. Faculty members are much more likely to accept processes developed by their peers than those developed by some outside group without their input. Therefore it is essential to support faculty development of the assessment efforts in whatever ways possible.

For example, have the faculty determined whether an institution-wide committee can best monitor assessment? Are there faculty members within the departments who have major responsibility for guiding department assessments? Does the faculty frame the key assessment questions that it wants answered? Are institutional administrators willing to accept variations in assessment practices from department to department?

Other Challenges

Of course, getting faculty member buy-in is only part of the plan. 

Be alert to administrative or bureaucratic obstacles to successful assessment and work to overcome them. For example, is the process for requesting standard data from your campus' institutional research department easy or does it require excessive paperwork and approval processes? When faculty members develop recommendations for improving campus procedures beyond their departments, do campus decision-makers recognize the value of those recommendations and act upon them? Even if the acknowledgment is only to explain why something might not be possible at the moment or to suggest alternative ways of accomplishing what the faculty members have identified as a weakness, it's important the faculty member know he or she has been heard.

Administrative obstacles may work against students as well. For example, are assessment processes that students must undergo efficient or excessively time consuming?

Don't rush assessment just to get it done. The long-term results may be damaged if proper time and thought isn't put into developing objectives and procedures. Help senior administrators and board members understand the value of a carefully considered, reflective process. 

Build time into the assessment process for effective data gathering, analysis, and reflection upon the results. If data beyond the program itself need to be collected, let the faculty know how to secure it and involve those who have to provide the data early enough so that they, too, can do an effective job. If faculty members do not have the technical expertise for analyzing data, link them to individuals who do.

Provide incentives for the assessment. Certainly release time or stipends will help, but remember that faculty members value other incentives, too. Does the dean or vice president for academic affairs write a personal letter to faculty members working on assessment, thanking them for their efforts? Does a copy of the letter go in their files? Does the assessment budget provide minigrants to support faculty research into critical questions, such as retention or student culture factors? Does the president publicly recognize faculty members' efforts?

Allow faculty leaders to emerge and recognize their ideas. Be alert to any insight that a faculty member may provide. Sentences that begin with such comments as "If only we could . . . " or "You know what I think is wrong here?" may signal that a faculty member has really given thought to an issue, and the comments shouldn't be written off as faculty obstinacy. They may, in fact, really signal sincerity. Within their concerns may be ideas for possible pilot projects or insight into more effective assessment processes.

Introduce faculty members to others who can support their ideas. You may even want to create your own faculty advisory group that can honestly alert you to possible pitfalls, as well as give you positive suggestions.

Provide sustained and consistent support from administrators. This will be critical in convincing faculty members of the value of their assessment efforts. I have already mentioned the obvious incentives or budget items that can support assessment. Beyond that, though, when administrators regularly recognize faculty members' accomplishments in speeches, in their support of policy ideas, and in their honest appreciation for the value that assessment can add to an institution's credibility and mission, it validates that what faculty members do in assessing the institution's programs really does matter.

Conclusion

If assessment is to become part of the institution's culture, administrators need to recognize it as such and not perceive it as something to be assigned to faculty members while the administrators move on to other matters.

To relate assessment to your institution's culture and context, start with the things that your faculty members see as valuable, think about what that implies for assessment, and then devise activities that will mesh assessment with their values. By understanding the culture of your institution, a culture that both creates and reinforces faculty values, you can engage faculty members in ways that they will respect and respond to.

Reprinted with permission from the American Association for Higher Education