About six months ago, my colleagues and I at StudentVoice thought it would be a good idea to “hit the road” and offer workshops for Member Campuses. The intention was to educate our users about new capabilities and techniques, while at the same time create a forum for conversation around innovative ideas and assessment best practices.
I personally attended workshops in Long Island, Buffalo, and Toronto. During these sessions, I kept finding myself thinking “we can do that?” Just goes to show you even the co-founder doesn’t know everything! The reality is, StudentVoice has progressed at such a fast pace that many of our users are not aware of all the tools available to them. At the summation of one of the fall workshops, an attendee commented “I always thought StudentVoice was just about surveys.” Hopefully the information below, which is a summary of sessions from the workshops, informs you about new ideas and possibilities for future assessment efforts with StudentVoice.
Assessment Planning
In order to make the most of the data you are working with, it is critical that you plan ahead. Whether you are determining data requirements, mapping out future projects, or monitoring activity, StudentVoice can help. Here’s some food for thought.
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Discuss plans with your StudentVoice Assessment Consultant
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Map out projects in the online StudentVoice project calendar
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Monitor activity using System Status tools (presented on Getting Started page after logging in)
Direct Assessment Measures
Incorporating direct measures into assessment practice is often a challenge. One method of a direct measurement focused on during the recent assessment workshops was a rubric. A rubric is the guide used to score performance assessments in a reliable, fair, and valid manner and is generally composed of dimensions for judging student performance and a scale for rating performances on each dimension.
Opportunities for using rubrics include:
Contact your StudentVoice Assessment Consultant to:
Intelligent Outreach
StudentVoice has recently released technical capabilities that presents survey respondents with a customized results page based on their survey responses, and also provides designated faculty and staff with the ability to use those results to impact student success. The use of this feature can help:
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Enhance retention efforts
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Use assessments as learning tools
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Provide faculty and staff with resources to guide conversations with students
Contact your StudentVoice Assessment Consultant to learn how to put the these capabilities into action at your campus. This may include providing resources for academically at-risk students, helping undecided majors find resources, and advertising upcoming programs or events that may benefit students.
Cross Project Reporting
The StudentVoice assessment platform can host custom assessments (i.e. web, PDA, and paper) , national studies (e.g., NSSE), and data from student information systems (SIS). Cross project reporting is a feature that StudentVoice has designed to enable efficient analysis of multiple data sets in one interface. The process for cross project reporting is simple. Use the Add/Remove Questions tab in the Results screen to see projects that share common respondents and then generate data reports that cut across projects.
There are several immediate benefits to using cross project reporting with demographic data and results from assessments where students have consented to be identified.
Student Panels
In the world of StudentVoice, a “panel” is a subset of identified respondents. One application of panels is to create samples (e.g., first year, commuters, residents) of students ahead of time so they are ready to go for future assessments. This approach can be helpful in safe guarding against survey fatigue. Another use is to identify certain respondents to be included in a follow-up or longitudinal study. StudentVoice has developed technology that makes it easier to create and use panels on a regular basis.
Contact your Assessment Consultant or reference online help to learn more about how to setup and use panels.
Custom Benchmarking
In addition to benchmarking data against peer-like campuses, StudentVoice also supports internal benchmarking opportunities. Here are examples of the types of custom benchmarking that were discussed at the recent assessment workshops.
Performance Indicators
Also referred to as “dashboard indicators,” “balanced scorecards,” or "metrics", performance indicators focuses an organization on aspects of their programs and services important to its success. They can also help determine if the organization is headed in the right direction. Starting in September, StudentVoice released access to a performance indicator tool for all Member Campuses. After logging in to www.studentvoice.com and navigating to the Get Started page, you will notice a new tab above announcements titled “Performance Indicators.”
The interface for creating and updating KPIs is very easy to use, and permits variable display settings and customizable access.
StudentVoice is offering a webinar on the benefits and best practices of performance indicators. More details including a sign up form are available at http://www.studentvoice.com/app/Training.
In conclusion and as that regional member meeting attendee said, StudentVoice is a great deal more than just surveys. We are already working on the next round of tools and services to continue to allow you to maximize your assessment efforts.
Michael
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