Job advice, feedback and closing the loop

While the tabulation was under way of results from the incoming spring semester students who took last month's College Needs Assessment Survey, a student worker handed us a note. It outlined a couple of "questions and concerns" raised by the data she was compiling, and they were good questions.

"Seeing how the semester has started," she wrote," some of these students have questions about career goals, [and] how to get money for education. ... As a school, what are we doing to make sure these students are getting their questions answered b/c we give this survey to find out what a student needs, but what happens in return? Do we follow up on the students?"

She was right -- students do have career questions. Among the top educational and personal needs identified on the survey, SCI students ranked above the national norm in wanting information about: (1) Obtaining adequate funds to finance my education; (2) Obtaining work experience in career areas of interest to me; (3) Learning about educational opportunities after graduation, e.g. professional school, graduate school, etc.; and (4) Learning more about the education requirements/training necessary for jobs of interest to me. Spring semester rankings were remarkably consistent with those of a larger cohort in the fall.

So I asked around to see what we're doing already. I learned Becker Library directs students to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, college catalogs and other sources. And the Student Affairs Office posts job openings on a bulletin board in the Quiet Lounge. But, as in other areas, the job and career guidance we offer tends to be informal and undocumented.

"It's it's one of my duties, but not necessarily a formal program," said Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling. "If anybody has a question about job openings or resumes, they come talk to me. The [faculty] advisers in different fields do a lot of career counseling too."

That rings true. I know I spend a fair amount of time talking with students who express an interest in journalism or communications, and I document the activity at least to the extent of mentioning it on my year-end faculty development reports. But I couldn't claim it as a formal program.

Probably we're going to have to look at job and career counseling as our assessment program continues. Right now we're still in an information-gathering phase of our College Needs Assessment Survey, and we have some statistical sampling threshholds to cross before we come to any conclusions. But our early findings strongly suggest a perceived need among our students.

If nothing else our preliminary feedback, both formal and informal, suggests that we need to take an overall look at what we're doing with career counseling and where it fits into our stated mission ... in other words, as our student worker suggested, to "find out what a student needs" and document "what happens in return." It's all part of establishing what Cecilia Lopez of the North Central Association calls "... a feedback loop, that is, documentation of how the information derived from interpretation of the data has been disseminated, to what constituents, how often, and to what end."

-- Pete Ellertsen, outcomes assessment facilitator

Now showing on a website near you --

New to your friendly, local, neighborhood outcomes assessment website -- SCI speech professor Gary Vitale's apologia for his SPH 110 fundamentals course and an analysis of his short-answer quizzes. "The best part of this outside pressure to establish assessment techniques is that it makes each of us question the fundamentals of education, itself, and our discipline in particular," says Gary. "Why should students in the 21st century have to know rhetoric? Who cares about an audience when we rarely are part of one or need to be? And why should a student have to know how to pronounce 'comparable'? Each of us has our own skull-cracking questions about the courses we teach. Answers need to be found for these basic-these fundamental- questions and those answers must be conveyed as eloquently as possible to our students. Otherwise, a college course becomes just another arbitrary hurdle that a student must jump over on his way to snatching the brass ring of a college degree that he hopes will land him a $45,000 entry level job."

Feb. 26, 2002
Vol. 2 No. 6

• An excellent nuts-and-bolts guide to practical assessment! Consider it a CATalyst on Classroom Assessment Techniques. It's the SIU-Edwardsville. site on CATs.
• Another CATalyst: An Introduction to Classroom Assessment Techniques by Diane M. Enerson, Kathryn M. Plank, and R. Neill Johnson of Penn State's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at http://www.psu.edu/celt/CATs.html
• Primary Trait Analysis is discussed in detail, along with other matters, in the website of Raymond Walters College, University of Cincinnati.
• To see the context for our efforts on assessment, accreditation and planning, read NCA's Five Criteria for Accreditation.
• Parkland College. See what another two-year college in downstate Illinois has been doing -- and when.
• Much of the conceptual framework of our assessment plan at SCI is based on Edgar Schein's thoughts on organizational culture, which are summarized and quoted in the above British website. Visit Schein's website at MIT, too.
• Principles. American Association for Higher Education. This Washington, D.C., advocacy group's Web site includes a FAQ page and a universally accepted set of Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning.
  

Committee
Pete Ellertsen, chair
Barb Bernardi
Bob Blankenberger
Nadine Elchlepp (student)
Susan Full
Alice Gutierrez
Jim Harris
Dave Holland
Jeff Mueller (ex officio)
Kevin Broeckling (ex officio)