2024 Pre-Institute Workshops
All Pre-Institute workshops will be held on Sunday, October 27, 2024. You may sign up and pay for any of the Pre-Institute workshops when completing the online registration form for the 2024 Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. Pre-Institute workshop fees ($150 for full-day; $75 for half-day) are in addition to the Institute registration fees.
Attending a Pre-Institute workshop can be a valuable experience for several reasons:
- In-depth learning: Pre-Institute workshops offer a more in-depth learning experience than regular conference sessions. Due to their longer duration, workshops allow for a more comprehensive exploration of the specific workshop topic.
- Practical experience: Pre-Institute workshops offer engaging exposure to the subject matter, giving attendees the opportunity to consider and apply what they learn in the workshop to their own contexts. This can be particularly helpful for attendees who prefer a more interactive learning experience.
- Networking: Pre-Institute workshops can be an excellent opportunity to connect with other attendees who share similar interests and goals. By attending a workshop, you can meet and network with other practitioners, potentially leading to new opportunities for collaboration.
- Access to thought-leaders: Pre-Institute workshops are facilitated by assessment and improvement thought-leaders. This provides attendees with a unique opportunity to learn directly from experienced practitioners and to ask questions in real-time.
Overall, attending a Pre-Institute workshop can be a valuable investment in your professional development. The workshops offer opportunities to learn in-depth, gain practical and applicable experience, network with like-minded colleagues, and access experienced practitioners in the field of assessment and improvement.
Full–Day Workshop | 9:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Morning Half–Day Workshops | 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Afternoon Half–Day Workshops | 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Full–Day Workshop | 9:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m. | $150
01A – Assessment 101
Assessment. Where to start? It’s here in Assessment 101. Participants will interact with each other and engage in hands-on activities throughout this full-day workshop. You will grapple with questions fundamental to higher education such as: What should students know, think, and be able to do when they graduate? And how would someone know if students succeeded? Fortunately, assessment can help us address these questions. Specifically, by the end of this workshop, you will be able to do the following: (1) explain the basic steps in the assessment process, (2) distinguish among beginning, developing, good, and advanced assessment reporting, (3) develop an assessment plan for one student learning outcome (SLO), and (4) discuss the fundamentals of applying interventions [e.g., pedagogy and curriculum] at the program level to improve student learning.
Keston H. Fulcher and Laura Lambert, James Madison University
Audience: Beginner
Primary Track: Assessment Methods
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Morning Half–Day Workshops | 9:00 a.m.–12:00 Noon | $75 each
02A – The Scholar’s Academy: From Evidence-Informed Inquiry to Knowledge Dissemination
The purpose of the Scholar’s Academy is to: (1) promote the use of evidence-informed perspectives in teaching, learning, assessment, and improvement, (2) equip participants with the frameworks, resources, and networks to support their growth as evidence-informed professionals, and (3) encourage the dissemination of promising practices, lessons learned, and ideas for consideration, replication, or adaptation through conference presentations and articles in publication outlets. Participants will leave the workshop with a plan to conduct evidence-informed scholarly inquiry in their context—including Zoom-based follow-up support—with the goal leading to eventual knowledge dissemination. Note: There is also an afternoon Scholar’s Academy workshop, organized by the HIPs in the States Community of Practice, with an emphasis on High Impact Practices (HIPs) scholarship.
Organizers of the Assessment Institute and Editors from such publications as Assessment Update, Research & Practice in Assessment, the Journal of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness, and the Journal of Student Affairs Inquiry, Improvement, and Impact
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Leadership for Assessment
02B – Jumpstarting General Education Program Review: A Systems Thinking Approach to the Self-Study
Often overlooked in the discussion of a general education program development and assessment is the issue of program review. The Association for General and Liberal Studies (AGLS) offers two resources, “The Gen Ed Leader’s Playbook” and a “Guide to Assessment and Program Review,” to stimulate a collaborative discussion for improving a general education program. The Playbook provides leaders with various tools to help address the tough questions, such as “Why do we need Gen Ed Programs?” At the heart of the “Guide” is a set of twenty systems analysis questions to improve program quality. This workshop focuses on the initial stage of the self-study and allows attendees to “test-drive” the tools and practice some basic general education program evaluation steps.
Jody DeKorte, Purdue Global; Christine Robinson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Stephen Biscotte, Virginia Tech
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: General Education
02C – Designing a Comprehensive Assessment Plan for Student Success
Student success is typically defined by GPA, retention, persistence, and career outcomes. To foster these outcomes, colleges and universities provide academic and other support services. However, missing from this success equation are critical considerations such as basic needs, belonging, and self-efficacy. In this session, presenters will share a framework conceptualizing the connection between needs and outcomes that will be used to guide participants through a process to develop a comprehensive assessment plan for student success. Participants will leave with actionable strategies for assessing student success and its antecedents.
Gavin Henning, New England College; and Anne Lundquist, Temple University
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Leadership for Assessment
02D – Do You Have a Collaboration Playbook? The RARE Model Can Help with That!
Assessment professionals agree that interpersonal skills are the most essential to our success (Morrow et al., 2022), but how do you nurture relationships in assessment? Do you have a playbook? In this pre-institute workshop, the co-presenters will provide demonstrations, active learning exercises, and tools from their forthcoming (2025) book. The RARE Model is a framework that you can intentionally incorporate into your assessment toolkit (Clucas Leaderman and Polychronopoulos, 2019). In this session, you will observe, reflect upon, and practice using interpersonal strategies to strengthen collaborative relationships, problem-solving, and meaning-making in assessment work, while tailoring your approach to specific audiences and cultures within your institution.
Emilie Clucas Leaderman, Springfield Technical Community College, and Gina B. Polychronopoulos, George Mason University
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Faculty/Professional Development
02E – Power BI Basics: Dashboard Building for Assessment Professionals
Interactive dashboards are a powerful tool used to visualize data. As postsecondary campuses collect an increasing amount of data related to student learning, satisfaction, and success outcomes, dashboards are becoming a commonly used method to visualize data. Dashboards are highly adaptive and can be used to display many types of data, including data from learning management systems, student surveys, admissions data, demographic data, and student success indicators. This workshop will focus on building dashboards using Power BI for participants with little or no prior experience using Power BI. The entire workshop will be a hands-on learning experience, and participants will leave with a newly created dashboard. The emphasis of the workshop will be learning the basic steps of Power BI dashboard building in order to adapt these skills to other contexts for future use. Participants must bring a laptop computer to use and have Power BI installed prior to the workshop. A dataset will be provided for participants.
Shane Schellpfeffer, University of North Dakota; Caitlyn Jessee, Florida State University; and Jeremy Fry, Indiana University School of Dentistry
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: Use of Technologies in Assessment
02F – Strategic Framework: Crafting a Comprehensive Faculty Development Program Aligned with Assessment and Accreditation Standards
Faculty development that is timely and responds to accreditation changes and feedback is critically important. This workshop aims to help participants develop a comprehensive faculty professional development program including a robust orientation. Recognizing the substantial investment of time, attention, effort, and financial resources in faculty development, this process is strategically crucial. It serves as a pivotal process in acquainting faculty with the institution, establishing institutional and faculty connections, communicating expectations clearly, and assuring accreditation needs become part of faculty development. During the workshop, participants will engage in interactive, hands-on activities to: 1) identify the essential components of faculty professional development including initial orientation, establish a comprehensive understanding of “must-have” elements, 2) develop a “just-in-time” model for faculty professional development, ensuring relevance and timeliness and considering feedback from accreditors, 3) evaluate the effectiveness of their institution’s faculty professional development program through practical assessment strategies, and 3) provide evidence demonstrating that the institution meets and responds to accreditation requirements, both institutional and programmatic, pertaining to faculty training.
Nehad El-Sawi and Amy N. Morris, Des Moines University
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Faculty/Professional Development
02G – Closing the Loop: Strategies for Acting on Results
The assessment cycle is a critical tool for all practitioners to make continuous improvements. While any step in the assessment cycle can be halted, one step that can be especially challenging is “closing the loop.” The purpose of closing the loop often refers to using results to make improvements. In this workshop we’ll discuss and apply strategies to act on results, including topics of reporting, strategic planning, change management, and a culture of assessment.
Shaun Boren, University of Florida; and Kimberly Kruchen, University of Colorado Boulder
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Student Affairs and Co-Curricular Programs and Services
02H – Introduction to High-Impact Practices
The purpose of this workshop is to familiarize attendees with the fundamentals of High-Impact Practices (e.g., internships, service-learning, and undergraduate research). As a result of the session, educators will be able to list specific learning opportunities, describe aspects of quality, and relate these experiences to important outcomes.
Jillian Kinzie, National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and Indiana University Bloomington; and John Zilvinskis, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: HIPs in the States/High-Impact Practices
02I – Scaling HIPs: Broadening Access While Preserving Quality
The benefits of High Impact Practices (HIPs) to promote student learning and success are well documented. Many campuses desire scaling HIPs to offer opportunities for more students to avail themselves of these benefits, yet these interventions are often reliant on the passions, interests, and investments of energy and effort by individual educators, departments, or programs involved in their design and implementation. This workshop discusses ways to broaden access to HIPs while preserving elements of these experiences that make them so impactful. Strategies related to stakeholder engagement, faculty development, change management, resource allocation, and quality assurance—in the context of scaling HIPs—will be addressed. Participants will leave with a plan for scaling HIPs in their respective contexts.
Jerry Daday, Indiana University Indianapolis, and Associates
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: HIPs in the States
02J – Tips and Tricks for Using AAC&U’s VALUE Rubrics: “Hacking” the Rubrics to Advance Teaching, Learning, and Assessment
Rubrics have been heralded as a solution to any number of assessment and accountability questions facing higher education. This workshop will empower participants to fully utilize rubrics on their campuses, with AAC&U’s VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) approach to assessment as the starting point. Participants will be exposed to rubric best practices and resources, develop customized rubrics by “hacking” VALUE rubrics, and return to their campuses primed to implement context-specific rubric strategies.
Jessica Chittum, American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Emerging Trends in Assessment
02K – Liberating Assessment and Assessment Professionals: A Step-by-Step Guide to NOT Stay in Your Lane
Do you want to engage in meaningful accreditation efforts that catalyze social justice and student success rather than serving a compliance function at your institution? Are you someone who wants to inform faculty development, advance culturally responsive teaching, learning, and curriculum design, and break down existing siloes and power differentials between academic and non-academic spaces at your institution using assessment? In this session, we will explore and expose the barriers to being impactful change agents and levers for continuous improvement and equity at our institutions. You will learn 10 tried-and-tested strategies with supporting resources and applied case-studies to dismantle structural, cultural, and institutional barriers at your institutions. We will also have an opportunity to co-create and ideate additional strategies (in collaboration with each other) to be the change we wish to see at our institutions. Together, we will learn how to not stay in our lane. Effectively. Safely. Powerfully.
Divya Bheda, Santa Clara University
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Strategy and Planning
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Afternoon Half–Day Workshops | 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. | $75 each
03A – Student Partnership in Assessment: Ideas for Meaningful Student Engagement
In more than three decades of work, we are yet to regularly evidence a return on the investment of student outcomes assessment. Many adjustments to the process have been made (e.g., outcomes design, motivation, instrument design, faculty buy-in). Nevertheless, the key stakeholders, students, are rarely included in the process. Instead, we must—often incorrectly—assume the student experience and build our processes accordingly. To address this issue, participants will engage in a guided redesign of a specific assessment process at their own institution; intentionally planning for student partnership.
Nicholas Curtis, University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Robin Anderson, James Madison University
Audience: Intermediate
Topic: Student Partnership and Engagement in Assessment
03B – Adapting to a ChatGPT World in Ways that Support Equity and Accuracy in Measures of Student Learning
ChatGPT has disrupted the educational landscape and created both challenges and opportunities for the equitable assessment of student learning. Student work on assignments influence their learning. The grades they receive influences their success and feelings about belonging. In this workshop, the Grand Challenges in Assessment Project directors will share a model that identifies equity traps (features of assignments associated with inequities in learning or the measurement of learning) and provides on-ramps (simple changes that increase equity and improve measurement). We will help you increase equity in higher education by preparing you to identify and remedy features of assignments that can interfere with students' ability to demonstrate proficiency or create errors in measurement that discredit the learning of minoritized students. We will highlight ways in which traditional assignments are vulnerable to completion using artificial intelligence and ways in which artificial intelligence can support or interfere with equity.
Karen Singer-Freeman, Wake Forest University; and Christine Robinson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
03C – The Role of Assessment and IE/IR Professionals in Building Equity-Minded Decision Cultures
Data-informed decision cultures committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) require commitment and collaboration across the institution. Each administrative and academic unit provides unique expertise essential to the pursuit of environments supportive of student success. In this workshop we will explore the intersection of DEI and the institution’s data function, including assessment, institutional effectiveness, and institutional research; develop a common understanding of relevant concepts and terms; explore what it means to frame our work with an equity lens; and identify the ways in which we can contribute to efforts to diversify our field. Join us for a safe space to learn together.
Michele J. Hansen, The Ohio State University; and Bethany Miller, Macalester College
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
03D – Competency-Based Education & The Hallmark Practices of Assessment
Competency-Based Education (CBE) has grown substantially nationally and internationally in the past decade. Colleges and universities cite the top three reasons for building competency-based education programs are to expand access for non-traditional learners, respond to workforce needs, and improve learning outcomes. Through a backward design approach, CBE programs are built centering first on observable competencies, which use authentic assessments to ensure measurable and work-relevant learning outcomes. In this engaging workshop, presenters will share the architecture of CBE, its quality framework, Assessment hallmark practices, and strategies for building quality relevant programs. Join the Competency-Based Education Network experts to learn how CBE programs can advance effective assessment approaches in a skills-based society.
Laurie G. Dodge and Ryan Specht-Boardman, Competency-Based Education Network
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Competency-Based Education and Assessment
03E – Developing Implementation Plans for Meaningful Assessment: Connecting Theory to Practice
This workshop is intended for those starting an assessment process or practice, wanting to review or revise existing assessment processes or practices, or those interested in examining the efficacy or embeddedness of assessment at the course, program, general education, student affairs, or institution-level. Workshop participants will explore a contextualized history of assessment, consider the theory connections behind design of assessment processes and data collection and use, and develop an action plan to inform local implementation of meaningful assessment. Whether faculty, staff, or administrators, this workshop provides guidance and resources pulling from a forthcoming textbook on the theory and implementation of assessment in higher education.
Joseph D. Levy, Excelsior University; and Natasha Jankowski, New England College
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Assessment Methods
03F – The Scholar’s Academy: A Framework for Designing, Implementing, and Publishing High-Impact Practices
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) are transformative teaching strategies that have been widely recognized for their effectiveness in enhancing student learning, engagement, retention, and success across various educational settings. The HIPs in the States track invites educators, researchers, and practitioners to explore the multifaceted dimensions of HIPs, emphasizing evidence-based assessment, program quality, equitable access, and the impact on student success. This workshop is a comprehensive half-day session aimed at equipping participants with the skills and resources necessary to implement a HIP project and produce scholarship from it. Through discussion and facilitated application related to designing, implementing, assessing, and publishing on a high-impact practice, this workshop culminates in a ready-to-use "project in a box" for participants to take home from the conference. This experience is aimed at those who have some foundational knowledge of HIPs and their design and implementation. Note: There is also a morning Scholar’s Academy workshop, facilitated by Organizers of the Assessment Institute and Editors from such publications as Assessment Update, Research & Practice in Assessment, the Journal of Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness, and the Journal of Student Affairs Inquiry, Improvement, and Impact.
Sara Evans, Kennesaw State University; and Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: HIPs in the States/High-Impact Practices
03G - Empowering Insights: Data Storytelling with Tableau- A Workshop on Organizing, Visualizing, and Crafting Compelling Narratives from Survey Data
In this interactive workshop, participants will dive into the dynamic world of data visualization and storytelling using Tableau. With a focus on survey data, attendees will learn essential techniques for organizing, visualizing, and weaving impactful narratives from raw information. Through hands-on exercises and expert guidance, participants will explore the versatility of Tableau's features in transforming complex datasets into clear and compelling stories. From preparing your dataset in Excel, creating insightful dashboards, and incorporating interactive elements, this workshop will equip attendees with the skills to effectively communicate key findings and insights. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced user, join us to unlock the full potential of your survey data and elevate your data storytelling proficiency with Tableau. This workshop is hosted by the Grand Challenges in Assessment Data Visualization Team, which was tasked with increasing the use of data visualizations and data storytelling. Note: Participants will need to bring their own laptop to the workshop and will be required to download the free trial version of Tableau. More information and instructions will be communicated to registered participants prior to the start of the Institute.
Becky Croxton, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Ryan Smith, Illinois State University
Audience Level: Beginner
Topic: Use of Technologies in Assessment
03H – Creating and Implementing a Sustainable Assessment Process: Practical Approaches for Harmonizing Accountability and Improvement
The fundamental purpose of assessment is to continually enhance student learning. However, in most educational institutions, the design and execution of assessments are predominantly tied to meeting external demands, such as accreditation and state mandates. Unfortunately, this approach often relegates systematic improvements in student learning and program effectiveness to mere byproducts of the assessment process. In this presentation, we offer practical strategies for creating, implementing, and sustaining a systematic institutional assessment process. These strategies are geared toward fostering a culture of continuous improvement, particularly in light of the ongoing challenges posed by the pandemic and the advancements in artificial intelligence, while also addressing compliance requirements.
Felix Wao, University of Oklahoma
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Leadership for Assessment
03I – The Career and Curriculum Combo: Supercharging Learner Experiences and Outcomes (Inside and Outside the Classroom)
Faculty are a key component of students’ learning and career journey, and this session supports that work. During this session, faculty gather information, techniques, and best practices to intentionally infuse and integrate competencies into curriculum to enhance the learner experience—making an explicit connection between the academic discipline and the student learning journey. National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) provides an interactive workshop for faculty to integrate career competencies into the curriculum. The hands-on workshop facilitates opportunities to: align and strengthen the link between curriculum and career competencies; embed career competencies in existing courses in ways that are academically rigorous; and expand and develop work-based experiential learning opportunities for diverse students.
Krys Ardayfio, National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE)
Audience Level: Intermediate
Topic: Faculty/Professional Development