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Assessment
What is Assessment?
“Assessment is essential not only to guide the development of individual students but also to monitor and continuously improve the quality of programs, inform prospective students and their parents, and provide evidence of accountability to those who pay our way.”
— Lion F. Gardiner, Redesigning Higher Education: Producing Dramatic Gains in Student Learning, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, Vol. 23, No. 7, p. 109
Assessment in higher education plays a vital role in ensuring the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of educational experiences. It involves gathering, analyzing, and reflecting on information from multiple and diverse sources to understand what students know, understand, and can do as a result of their learning experiences.
Assessment helps institutions:- Enhance teaching and learning
- Improve academic and support programs
- Guide institutional planning and resource allocation
- Demonstrate accountability to stakeholders
Survey Administering
The Office of Institutional Research & Effectiveness (IR&E) leads the coordination of assessment-related surveys to ensure efficiency, integrity, and usefulness of data.
Our Goals:- Coordinate survey administration to minimize redundancy, overlap and survey fatigue
- Maintain a central survey calendar
- Support development, distribution, and analysis of surveys
- Ensure requested data are not already available from other sources
Assessment Activities
The IR&E Office administers a suite of interrelated assessment surveys that support institutional decision-making and continuous improvement. These tools gather both demographic and qualitative information, and include:
- Institution-specific surveys, tailored to Detroit Mercy’s needs
- National standardized instruments such as:
- Noel Levitz Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI)
- Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) Survey
- Provide insight into student experiences and institutional effectiveness
- Feed into national datasets to track higher education trends across the U.S.
- Support accreditation, planning, and strategic initiatives
A list of current surveys in use, their purposes, and the timing of their administration is provided below.
Academic Assessment
Academic assessment focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of student learning within academic programs and courses. It ensures that curriculum, instruction, and learning outcomes are aligned to promote student success and support the university’s mission.
Information regarding Academic Assessment can be found here.
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National Surveys
The survey covers a wide range of student characteristics: parental income and education, ethnicity and other demographic items; financial aid; secondary school achievement and activities; educational and career plans; and values, attitudes, beliefs, and self-concept. TFS Survey uses demographic and attitudinal data on incoming students to measure trends in higher education. TFS is administered at the beginning of a student's freshman year. This information is analyzed by the Higher Education Research Institute .
This survey is administered every three years.
Historically, from 2008-2014 this survey was administered every two years. From 2015-16 to 2019-20 the survey was administered every year as part of an NIH funded project.