An Institutional Self-Assessment of Organizational Patterns

The Inventory of Institutional Support for Student Assessment (ISSA, 1999) provides a useful guide for users wishing to assess their own institution’s organizational and administrative practices that have been designed and implemented to support or enhance the use of student assessment. It does so by helping to identify institutional support practices for undergraduate student assessment. It also examines the factors influencing the adoption of various support practices and how these practices enhance the impact of student assessment for institutional improvement.

The inventory is divided into five sections, which correspond to five of the eight domains in the Conceptual Framework from the NCPI Project 5.2 National Study:

1) institutional approaches to student assessment,
2) institutional support for student assessment,
3) external influences on institutional student assessment,
4) assessment management policies and practices, and
5) uses and impacts of student assessment.

The domain of institutional context is unique to each institution. Once the inventory is completed, the user can compare the results to other similar institutions (see Student Assessment by Differing Institutional Types).

The final two domains, integration with academic management and educational improvement, and institutional culture for student assessment, are addressed in the case study in Part III of this section.

The ISSA is designed to address the following questions:

1. What approaches to student assessment has your institution adopted? To what extent and how often does your institution collect student assessment data? What methods and instruments are used for student assessment at your institution?

2. What institution-wide organizational and administrative support patterns exist at your institution for the student assessment effort? What purpose and emphasis is given to student assessment? What office or position is charged with the responsibility for student assessment at your institution? Are there plans, policies, or institutional groups that guide the institution’s student assessment program?

3. What external constituencies, if any, have influenced the student assessment process at your institution? In what way?

4. What academic management policies and practices are in place to enhance or support the collection of student assessment data?

5. How and to what extent is the information from student assessment used for academic decision-making at your institution? What impact has the student assessment information had on your institution and on its various constituencies?

In order to complete the Inventory of Institutional Support for Student Assessment (ISSA), the user should follow the link, print the 16-page document, and follow the instructions on the page two before completing the inventory. Once the inventory has been completed, the user can then score the inventory and compare their scores with other institutions of similar types (see Student Assessment by Differing Institutional Types). For a more detailed explanation on scoring the inventory, see Chapter 2 of the Institutional Support for Student Assessment: Methodology and Results of a National Survey and accompanying tables. Users can then design or improve their institution’s organizational and administrative patterns based on these results.