Assessment serves as a vital tool for discerning whether students are engaging meaningfully with vocational reflection and whether our campus programs are advancing the vocation-related goals for which they were designed. It gives opportunity to reflect on the effectiveness of our efforts and consider how we might more faithfully steward our time and resources in service of our institutional vocational goals and priorities.
This page offers a curated collection of resources drawn from NetVUE member institutions and the broader literature, focused on assessing vocation-related goals and programming. These examples are intended to inspire and guide your own work. Some of them are ready to be used as they are, while others will require some time and thought to adapt to your particular program or context.
Keep in mind that assessment does not have to be complicated to be useful. As you browse the resources, consider which approach will give you the information you need to make decisions about next steps. Thank you for your interest in better understanding the impact of your work on the faculty, staff, and students on your campus.
Planning Your Assessment Efforts
Planning your assessment efforts at the start of the project can help ensure that you collect data at the right time and end up with information that is useful to you. Planning ahead also ensures that everyone on the implementation team is on the same page about project goals and timelines. As you are planning your assessment, remember that any one assessment tool has limitations. It is useful to consider using multiple strategies, techniques, or approaches, for example collecting both quantitative and qualitative. The following worksheets have a series of questions you can work through on your own or with your team to articulate your assessment goals and plan your assessment strategy for the project.
Hear from a NetVUE member institution about their experience with assessment
Dear Colleague,
When we launched our grant-funded program, we naturally had some assumptions about what the program might do; how it might work. If we had only collected feedback forms and participant numbers for the program, we would likely still believe those original assumptions. Robust programmatic assessment was the way we were able to find that, surprisingly, a few parts of our program had no noticeable effect at our institution. When we found a statistically significant difference between program participants and others, we were able to locate the program’s measurable impact and consider how we might capitalize on that part of the program.
Assessment may well be the broccoli of program design. It is good for our programs, but it is often less fun than dreaming up programmatic opportunities to cultivate vocation on campus. Yet assessment is not merely the key to designing a healthy, effective program, it can lead to other benefits such as the opportunity to publish findings, to add power to donor/institutional pitches to ensure a program’s future is secure, and to add knowledge to the field. Looking back, we under-estimated the resources we needed at every turn. We hope this guidebook provides you with some early considerations that allow you to set your program’s assessment up wisely and well. We wish you well as you allocate resources and look forward to your own program’s implementation!
Krista Carter and Ryan White
Director of Academic Advising and Associate Dean for Leadership Development & Applied Learning
Hope College
Classroom Specific Tools
There are a variety of ways to assess vocation-related learning goals within a course, including rubrics, writing samples, checklists, images, and self-assessment exercises.
Survey Approaches
Survey approaches vary from counting participation to open-ended questions or multiple-choice questions. These approaches can be used to learn more about learning outcomes and the effectiveness of programming initiatives.
Published Survey Scales
There are a number of survey measures related to vocation, calling, and work that are relevant to vocation-related learning outcomes or program goals.
Open Ended Explorations
Open ended explorations like focus groups and needs assessments are useful when launching a new initiative or when clarity is needed for future programming or survey design.
Grant Specific Assessment Resources and Recommendations
A strong assessment plan with a focus on qualitative and quantitative measures can help your institution demonstrate and celebrate its results and gain support for future initiatives. Consider the following as you plan your grant assessment efforts:
- Demonstrating impact is more than qualitative data from activities (like the number of people you reached or amount of money you spent). We are especially interested in data that shows assessment of progress.
- Consider questions that will help assess whether you are serving the population you think you are, providing services your strategy says you should be, and starting to see outcomes you’re expecting.
- Sharing only good news often doesn’t show the full picture of the programming. Talking about negative outcomes and how you handled them digs deeper into your institutional impact.
- Numbers are critical to measuring your impact, but not the only way to communicate your results. By blending quantitative and qualitative data, your data can come to life. Qualitative context like quotes, testimonials, and case studies are a great way to illustrate your outcomes.
- A strong mix of qualitative and quantitative data shows both the breadth of your work and depth of your impact. Stats from program outputs mixed with quotes connected to people at your institution is a comprehensive view of your impact.
Each NetVUE grant program has its own assessment plan and some unique assessment resources for you to be aware of and consider. Combine the strategies you find here with the assessment resources listed above to develop your grant assessment plan.
Contact
Do you have a vocation-related assessment tool that you would be willing to share with the rest of the NetVUE community? Is there a resource you were hoping to find on this site that wasn’t available? Contact Rachael Baker, associate director of NetVUE, at rbaker@cic.edu to talk further about your specific assessment needs.