{"id":1059,"date":"2013-01-04T18:49:26","date_gmt":"2013-01-04T18:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/?p=1059"},"modified":"2023-09-13T15:41:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-13T15:41:14","slug":"walking-the-walk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/?p=1059","title":{"rendered":"Walking the Walk"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"walking<\/a>
photo by :::mindgraph:::<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In spite of providing support to other areas of the College undertaking assessment projects, like many IR offices, ours had yet to fully engage with our own assessment.\u00a0 Sure, we had articulated goals<\/a> for our office some time ago, and had reflected on our success on the simpler, numeric ones, but only this year (as part of increased College-wide efforts) began to grapple seriously with how to assess some of the more complex ones.<\/p>\n

One of our take-aways from the Tri-College Teagle-funded Assessment<\/a> project that we’ve been involved with was that the effort to design rigorous direct assessment<\/span> is key, and the work that goes into thinking about this may sometimes be even more important than the measurement itself.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s one thing to observe this, and quite another to experience it firsthand.<\/p>\n

As Alex and I looked at our goals, each phrase begged clarification!\u00a0 We don’t want to just conduct research studies, we want to conduct effective studies.\u00a0 But what do we mean by “effective”?\u00a0\u00a0 How do we meet our audiences needs?\u00a0\u00a0 How do we identify our audience’s needs?\u00a0\u00a0 What is the nature of relationship between the satisfaction of a consumer of our research and the quality of the research?\u00a0\u00a0 And on and on.\u00a0\u00a0 Before even identifying the sorts of evidence of our effectiveness that we should look for, we had already identified at least a dozen ways to be more proactive in our work.<\/p>\n

The other revelation, which should not have been a surprise because I have said it to others so often, is that there are seldom perfect measures.\u00a0\u00a0 Therefore, we need to look for an array of evidence that will provide confidence and direction. There are many ways to define “effective” research – what is most important (and manageable) to know?<\/p>\n

And finally, it’s easy to get caught up in these discussions and in setting up processes to collect more and more evidence.\u00a0\u00a0 We could spend a lot of time exploring how a research study informed someone’s work and decision-making, but that time that could have instead been used in expanding the study. \u00a0 We have to find a balance<\/strong><\/em>, so that we do assessments that are most helpful, and don’t end up distracting us from the very work we’re trying to improve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In spite of providing support to other areas of the College undertaking assessment projects, like many IR offices, ours had yet to fully engage with our own assessment.\u00a0 Sure, we had articulated goals for our office some time ago, and had reflected on our success on the simpler, numeric ones, but only this year (as … Continue reading Walking the Walk<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/institutional-research\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}