Assessment
Overview
At Haverford College, a coherent system for the evaluation and improvement of the full range of services and programs informs planning, resource allocation and institutional renewal.
- Institutional Effectiveness Committee (IEC) – (President)
- Educational Experience: Curricular and Co-Curricular (Provost and Dean of the College)
- Student Learning Assessment – General Education Capstone
- Curricular and Co-Curricular Assessment
- College Operations: Administrative Departments – Administrative aspects of Academic Departments (Senior Staff)
- Department Assessment Plan (DAP) Process
- Employee Performance Evaluation
- Educational Experience: Curricular and Co-Curricular (Provost and Dean of the College)
Key sustainability features are built into Haverford’s IE system:
- It is relatively simple, aligned with existing organizational structures and processes, and includes documented assignment of responsibility
- It draws on institutional strength for deep discussion and collaboration
- It includes mechanisms for data and process management
Academic Programs and Student Learning Assessment
Assessment and evaluation within the academic sphere are associated with both strategic initiatives and regular operational practice. Various organizational structures are aligned and coordinated to facilitate academic planning and evaluation. In addition to our formal processes of assessment, our small size allows for effective informal assessments through direct communication among campus constituents, and our culture of consensus-based decision-making supports deliberate discussion, leading to improvement in practice and policies.
Academic Program Assessment
Comprehensive evaluation of curricular and co-curricular programs occurs within departmental, divisional, and college-wide scopes. This work both affects and reflects the closely related Student Learning Assessment.
The Educational Policy Committee (EPC) plays a key role in evaluating programmatic aspects of the overall curriculum, including general education (e.g. divisional, language, and writing requirements), the nature of our overall curriculum (e.g. the approval of new majors or programs of study), the structural components of the curriculum (e.g. minors, concentrations), the contemporary curriculum (e.g. approval of new courses) and academic aspects of co-curricular experiences (e.g. study abroad, internships through the Academic Centers).
Haverford has a well established program of external reviews for academic departments that supplement internal mechanisms of departmental assessment and provides additional disciplinary perspective.
Program Evaluation models to assess impact and program effectiveness are under development or discussion for multiple long-standing or new programs at the College.
Student Learning Assessment
Provost's Statement on Assessment, April 2014
Centrally, our task [as scholars and educators] is to help our students explore the world critically and cogently, which involves constantly revaluing assumptions and hypotheses by sifting ever-evolving evidence and producing a continuously revised account of one’s understanding. That is precisely what we’re asking departments and professors to do when developing, applying, and recalibrating assessment criteria for student learning in their courses and shared curricula. As the Teagle projects vividly display, this process can contribute to an essential responsibility of all educators—to give an intelligible and persuasive account of one’s work—but even more importantly, it can provide a flexible, generative vehicle for that work’s evolution.
I would suggest that we think of effective assessment as: involving students when possible; aligned with faculty’s essential educational mission; easy to revise and manage; flexible enough to inflect distinctive pedagogies but intelligible enough to contribute to the common enterprise; fitting, not faddish; generative of better education than that which it’s measuring; and rewarding and uplifting to all its participants.
—Kimberly W. Benston, Interim Provost (2012–2015)
Student Learning Assessment is a tool used to determine whether students are acquiring the skills, knowledge, habits of mind and personal development reflective of our educational goals. It is a systematic, multidimensional, long-term process of gathering data and using that information to enhance student achievement and experience, improve instruction and pedagogical practice, and refine the academic program.
Haverford College features a sustainable plan for direct assessment of learning outcomes in General Education and Senior Capstone Project coursework. This Assessment Plan, developed by our Educational Policy Committee (EPC) working in collaboration with the Institutional Effectiveness Committee (IEC), is endorsed by the Faculty, and is a permanent part of our ongoing efforts to review, revise, and improve curricular programs. Key features include:
- Direct assessment of student progress towards learning goals in a wide array of courses that fulfill our core and distribution requirements for General Education, representing all departments and programs
- Direct assessment of student progress towards learning goals in the context of Haverford’s Senior Capstone Project, for all departments and programs offering a major, and involving all students in each major
- Two sets of complementary rubrics (one for General Education, the other for the Senior Capstone Project) that allow individual faculty and departmental or programmatic groups to gather information about the pedagogical issues they find important
- A simple, sustainable system for data entry using web forms and permission-controlled, templated spreadsheets that allow for easy aggregation of results
- Live analysis and dynamic view of data, all available to individual departments, EPC, and the Provost’s Office
- Clear statements of responsibility for various phases of work in a cycle of assessment that ensures communication about challenges, at the department level, by EPC, and by the Provost’s Office
- Documentation of the entire system on a convenient internal assessment website, with instructions, tools, an archive of memoranda and findings, and with a clear plan for data management
Internal Student Learning Assessment Website
For those without access to the internal assessment website, additional detail about our systems of assessment for General Education and Capstone learning can be found within our 2017 MSCHE follow-up report. All recent reports to MSCHE are available on the Accreditation page.
Institutional Learning Goals
Goals and Aspirations of the Haverford Education
In Spring of 2010, the Board of Managers and the Faculty endorsed a set of institutional learning goals that a Haverford education is designed to achieve. This document, our "Educational Goals and Aspirations," continues to evolve as faculty consider and articulate the many facets of a Haverford education.
- Mastery and Critique
- Haverford College's curriculum is designed not only to help students acquire a particular body of knowledge but to develop the capacity to learn, to understand, to make sound and thoughtful judgments, and to balance creativity and analysis. Within each discipline, academic work evolves from the mastery of key concepts through critical analysis to active participation in the construction of scholarship. This intellectual preparation culminates in our academic requirement that each senior produce a piece of independent work in the form of a senior thesis or project. Students cultivate the ability to critique and analyze primary texts, to appreciate theoretical rigor, and to learn through observation, experiment, or empirical methods, as appropriate. Students thus gain mastery of their chosen disciplines.
- Ownership, Contribution, and Accountability
- In all disciplines, students are expected to contribute original ideas for which they are accountable. They learn to present and defend their ideas both orally and in writing. Students are encouraged to interrogate and articulate why they think what they think, both inside and outside of the classroom.
- Translation and Interpretation
- Students engage in acts of translation, interpretation, and cultural inquiry in every area of their studies. These intellectual habits encourage students to formulate questions, explore areas of difference, and understand their own positions vis-à-vis various forms of history, politics and knowledge. Such practices develop models of reading and analysis that illuminate students' scholarship and judgments across disciplines and contexts.
- Breadth and Depth
- In addition to mastering a discipline, all students are required to acquaint themselves with the breadth of intellectual approaches exemplified in the classic divisions of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities; they must have experience of a second language and acquire quantitative skills. As distinctions among the divisions continue to blur, students are encouraged to explore interdisciplinarity through minors and areas of concentration.
- Communication and Representation
- All academic majors require students to communicate and represent ideas in modes that are appropriate to the discipline. The primary form of communication is often written prose, but students also learn to express themselves and their original contributions in a variety of presentation forms (e.g., oral, artistic, creative). A College Writing requirement is implemented during the first year, to ensure that all students enter their academic disciplines with basic skills of written argument and persuasion.
- Non doctior, sed meliore doctrina imbutus
- Our Quaker heritage is expressed in the Haverford motto: "Not more learned, but imbued with better learning." We offer our students many opportunities to engage fundamental issues of inequality and social justice. The college encourages students to put learning into action for greater ethical purposes. Our Quaker principles turn classrooms into communities where faculty and students learn from each other, and where all voices are heard. In such contexts, students and faculty alike become better thinkers, listeners and speakers, making them partners in the creation of knowledge.
Student Learning Assessment Projects
The Tri-College Teagle Project, launched in the Fall of 2009 and funded by a grant from the Teagle Foundation, served as an important catalyst for the development of meaningful and useful student learning assessment. This effort began with two identified purposes: 1) to support intensive efforts of selected departments to assess a key institutional learning goal(s) as it related to their academic department, and to leverage these successful assessment models within, across, and beyond our campuses; and 2) to create opportunities for close participation of non-faculty stakeholders in meaningful, useful department-level assessment efforts, and in so doing, learn to better evaluate and overcome the challenges to sustaining such work on a larger scale.
Departmental Learning Goals
The articulation of departmental student learning goals is the foundational step of the assessment process. Crafted individually by each department’s faculty, the goals exist in the context of a four-step assessment process:
- Articulation of learning goals/objectives
- Application of curricular/learning strategies
- Assessment of learning, based on the articulated objectives
- Use of the assessment results to improve subsequent teaching and learning
Senior Capstone Goals & Assessment
The Senior Capstone represents the culmination of a Haverford student’s academic experience, and is one of the most important and rewarding ways that Haverford realizes its educational mission. It is an opportunity to do original research at levels usually reserved for graduate students, in partnership with faculty mentors.
This primary and summative assessment of disciplinary mastery requires students to apply the skills, methods, concepts, and habits of mind specific to their major field in the production of new knowledge, the original synthesis of existing knowledge, and/or creative artistic expression. Students become true scholars, and come to understand at a deep and practical level what it takes to create knowledge and to seek answers to challenging questions. In turn, they become more effective and influential agents for change in whatever field they choose.
There is need, in the senior year especially, to challenge the student’s powers of analysis and synthesis and to foster the creative use of the knowledge and skills that have been acquired in previous studies. There is also the need to evaluate the performance of the senior in the major field, not only to safeguard the academic standards of the College, but also to help the student’s self-evaluation at an important moment. In short, synthesis and evaluation in some form are both essential and may be achieved by various means as specified by the major departments.
Assessment Resources
- Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU)
- National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA)
Alumni Outcomes
Given our mission to provide a transformative undergraduate experience, many of our learning goals must be measured over time. Therefore, we ask our current students and alumni to reflect on their experiences at Haverford to help us understand the extent to which the developmental aspects of our educational mission are being achieved.
The myriad achievements of our distinguished alumni provide useful information about our institutional effectiveness. There are both quantitative and qualitative metrics that we use to track outcomes once our students become alumni. Our students are successful in earning fellowships, gaining acceptance to graduate & professional school, earning advanced degrees, and securing employment in a variety of fields after leaving Haverford, as summarized here.
A robust Center for Career and Professional Advising maintains a network of alumni professionals to connect with and to mentor current students. Our Alumni and Parent Relations and Individual Giving Offices cultivate lifelong relationships with our alumni, and encourage active participation in our alumni community. Many academic departments also maintain connections with their majors after graduation through departmental alumni webpages, social networking, and sustained personal contact between faculty members and alumni.
Budget and Resource Allocation
Resource allocation decisions are guided by the educational mission and the strategic goals of the College. Haverford’s budgeting principles strive for the elusive but important goal of maintaining four conditions simultaneously: operating budgets must be balanced, human assets developed and nourished, physical assets preserved, and the endowment’s purchasing power protected. An important corollary is that we provide access to a Haverford education to the most highly qualified students regardless of their ability to pay. As part of the annual review of Haverford’s financial health, there is an assessment of how well we are meeting these goals each year.
The budgeting process operationalizes support for mission-critical and strategic initiatives at every level, and across the College. The iterative budgeting process instills the discipline of periodic pauses to assess progress and adjust resource allocation decisions. The College’s operating budget is developed through a highly collaborative process. The Associate Vice President & Controller and Senior Vice President for Administration and Finance work directly with the College’s Senior Staff and the Administrative Advisory Committee (AAC) to construct a budget proposal. Major revenue and expenditure components are discussed with the Finance Committee of the Board of Managers throughout the year, and the final proposal is presented to the full Board of Managers for consideration and approval.
Migration to the GAAP-based budget approach is continuing at Haverford. An overview of our integrated budgeting process is available on our internal budget website.
Institutional Effectiveness Committee
The function of the Institutional Effectiveness Committee, established in 2010, is to take an institutional view of assessment at the College; to support cross-functional initiatives and activities for institutional improvement; and to identify and develop initiatives to help the College meet its near- and long-term institutional goals. The committee monitors progress of assessment activities, and functions as a visible structure for the summary, documentation, and communication of assessment efforts at the College. Reporting directly to the President, the Institutional Effectiveness Committee (IEC) is chaired by the Associate Provost for Curricular Development and Research. The committee includes a vice-chair with broad experience in assessment, and institutional representation reflective of the year’s agenda. Appointments are made annually.
Contact
Chair:
Helen White
hwhite [at] haverford.edu
Vice-Chairs:
Jesse Lytle
jlytle [at] haverford.edu
Catherine Fennell
cfennell [at] haverford.edu
Departmental Assessment for Administrative and Academic Units
Administrative and academic departments are the functional units of the College, and each has a specific purpose as articulated in its mission statement, goals and objectives. Evaluating the effectiveness of functional units involves two specific aspects of evaluation:
- Departmental assessment, evaluating the extent to which the department is achieving its purpose
- Employee performance evaluation, marking the effectiveness of the individuals who design and implement those programs
Departmental Assessment
Haverford completed its shift from localized planning and evaluation processes to a systematic formalization of departmental assessment for each of the College’s academic and administrative units. This revised system continues to complement our established budgeting processes and the ongoing assessment work of the Institutional Effectiveness Committee.
Departmental assessment is structured within the nine functional divisions of the College, and linkages are explicitly articulated, connecting goals between lower and higher organizational levels and then with the strategic goals of the College. The Executive Affairs Division, led by the Vice President & Chief of Staff, has ongoing responsibility for the development and maintenance of the IE System across departmental, divisional, and institutional levels. An internal IE website supports these processes. The annual IE cycle is also detailed below:
Key dates
- November: Budget requests due
- April: Institutional budget approved by the Board of Managers
- Summer: Senior Staff Planning Retreat
Planning DAP Timeline
- September to November: create planning DAP along with budget request for the fiscal year beginning July 1
- April to June: review/revise planning DAP to reflect the approved budget
- July to August: Convert planning DAP to operational DAP for the new fiscal year
Operational DAP Timeline
- September through June: implement and monitor activities supportive of DAP goals and objectives
- May through July: Analyze and assess results [some departments work on an academic year basis; others on a fiscal year basis]
- June through August: Prepare DAP report and discuss results and plans for improvement with supervisor; Division DAP reports included in Senior Staff Planning Retreat materials
The DAP reports and subsequent conversations inform the development of each of the nine Senior Staff Divisional Assessment reports prepared for the President and for discussion at the annual August Senior Staff retreat. Here the goals and priorities for the upcoming academic year are finalized, allowing for the iterative modification of some divisional or departmental assessment plans for the year ahead.
Each Divisional Assessment Plan includes the following common goal, directly linked to the President’s Assessment Plan goal on Governance, thereby creating collective ownership of the IE enterprise across the College:
Common Divisional Goal: Implement policies and procedures pertaining to planning, assessment, and management.
- Objective 1: All departments within the division successfully produce goals, objectives, metrics (DAPs) on time and a report as prescribed.
- Metric 1: Number/percentage of departments appropriately revising departmental goals/objectives based on institutional priorities
- Metric 2: Number/percentage of departments completing annual report
- Metric 3: Number/percentage of departments having annual review meeting with division leader
- Objective 2: Division leader supports and develops human capital within the division.
- Metric: Summary of support/development provided
- Objective 3: 100% of division departments successfully complete employee performance evaluations as prescribed by Haverford Policy.
- Metric: Number/percentage of divisional employee evaluations complete
- Objective 4: 100% of division departments effectively steward financial resources.
- Metric: Number/percentage of departments operating within current year budget
- Objective 5: 100% of division departments develop and submit required budget process documents on time.
- Metric 1: Number/percentage of departments submitting timely budget requests aligned with Divisional Goals
- Metric 2: Divisional budget request submitted on time along with
- Cover sheet including
- a summary of division department requests
- an indication of the relationship of requests to assessment results and/or strategic priorities
- prioritization of requests
- a list of significant upcoming budget items on the horizon
- Initial draft of Planning DAP for the FY
- Cover sheet including
- Objective 6: Support the President in stewardship of Board and Corporation relationships.
- Metric: Summary of support provided
- Objective 7: Annually reflect on the Culture of Evidence Continuum and strive, where appropriate, to move programs and departments toward a Culture of Evidence, and at a minimum strengthen a Culture of Strategy.
- Metric: Report on current and desired Divisional position on the continuum
Objective 7 refers to a tool for evaluating and advancing our institutional culture of assessment. The Culture of Evidence Continuum, includes five dimensions (intentionality, perspective, critical links, initiatives and directions, and planning processes) against which an organizational unit can be measured in terms of fostering a culture of good intentions, justification, strategy or evidence. We have deployed this tool both generally to assess institutional culture and in a targeted fashion to spur progress in particular areas.
Integration is a key feature of our system. Direct linkages between a department goal or objective, and division objective, are noted within the DAPs and are consolidated visually in divisional grids. Strategic priorities have been fully translated into the DAP framework. DAP assessments are intended to support future resource allocations, and reflective assessment of the previous year’s allocations is also integrated into our process.
External Department Review
To supplement the annual process of department assessment, administrative departments periodically undergo external review. These reviews are conducted as needed, either in response to the necessity for departmental reorganization, or new developments in technology, best practices, or College initiatives. Similar to Academic Department reviews, there is a self-study component followed by a visiting team review. Recommendations from the visiting team are shared with the relevant Senior Staff member, the President of the College, and the Department undergoing review.
Employee Performance Evaluation
Employee performance evaluation is separate from the process of departmental assessment. However, the effective operation of the Division and Department includes annual completion of this process, as noted within each of the Divisional Assessment Plans.
The Presidential Compensation and Review committee of the Board of Managers conducts the annual evaluation of the President of the College. In turn, the President reviews each member of the Senior Staff. According to Human Resource guidelines, Senior Staff members conduct annual reviews of the staff who report directly to them, and instruct department heads to conduct annual employee performance evaluations for faculty, exempt staff, and non-exempt staff. As part of the process, employees are given the opportunity for annual goal setting and discussion of the evaluation with their supervisor. Evaluations are filed with the Human Resources Office.
Faculty are evaluated through several formal and informal means. The Professional Activities Form is a self-assessment filed with the Provost annually by every regular full-time tenure-track or continuing faculty member. Academic Council is responsible for tenure, reappointment, and promotion reviews. Department Chairs evaluate junior (pre-tenure) and visiting faculty members in their department.