Institutional Effectiveness
"The effectiveness of an institution rests upon the contribution that each of the institution's programs and services makes toward achieving the goals of the institution as a whole." ----The Middle States Commission on Higher Education
Student learning takes place in the context of many interrelated programs and services. Elizabethtown College is committed to strengthening its programs and services with a program of meaningful institutional assessment.
July 2018 Institutional Effectiveness Gets Revamped
Elizabethtown College has successfully implemented an institutional effectiveness (administrative unit) assessment process for a number of years. This process specifically asks administrative offices to identify their mission, major functions, unit performance standards (UPS) for each function, and annual assessment targets for measuring progress. Assessment reports also note whether a UPS is tied to a specific aspect of the institution’s strategic plan. During the 2017-2018 academic year, at the request of employees to hold an “innovation summit” and other programs that foster innovation across campus, the Academic Affairs Division decided to alter the administrative unit assessment process on a trial basis. At the start of the Fall 2018 semester, and then again at the start of the Spring 2019 semester, administrative units will engage in a campus-wide poster presentation session. The purpose of this session is to publicly identify information that would otherwise be collected in the traditional assessment process, but also to document innovative policies and/or processes that the unit developed in recent years. All posters will be created using a common PowerPoint template, which will be stored on College servers and used to create an updated administrative unit assessment report. It is the College’s intention that discussing and disseminating innovative practices in a conference-like setting will allow other offices to learn from the experiences of their colleagues. Depending on the success of this new format, we may revise the current assessment method to incorporate innovative practices (where applicable), and potentially hold more poster sessions in the future.
Please refer any questions Kyle C. Kopko, Associate Dean of Institutional Effectiveness, Research, and Planning
Poster Template
The poster for each area could detail the following:
- Mission
- Function
- Last Year's Successes
- Next Year's Outlook
- Fun facts about the Dept/Center/Office, or team, that might surprise interested visitors during the session
Current Institutional Effectiveness Posters
Committees
Offices
2013-14 through 2017-18
A set of resources for measuring institutional effectiveness: Measuring Quality in Higher Education