Assessing Outcomes at the Institutional Level

Abstract

To colleges serving significant numbers of students who are parttime, adult, and reside off campus, it is important to understand their motivations and needs and to communicate effectively with them in order to plan and provide quality programming. An outcomes assessment approach that focuses on mission-derived institutional outcomes provides information that is useful to student empowerment, marketing and communications, advising, curriculum design, planning, and institutional self-study for accreditation review. This article describes such a program at Thomas Edison State College, relates this institution's experiences with surveys as assessment instruments, and explains how institutional-level outcomes assessment integrates with the institutional self-study process.