Welcome to a new year and to our new members on the SAAL Board. I am excited to introduce myself as the incoming chair and to announce our election winners. I am especially grateful to have Judd Harbin on as outgoing chair to continue to help guide our organization. …
I am not an American, but having lived here now for just over half of my life, there are some US holidays that, to some degree, my family and I have adopted into our lives. One thing that I appreciate is holidays that go beyond partying and fun (as enjoyable as those can be), such as Thanksgiving. …
https://daniellesunderhaus.com/tis-the-season-to-party/
Tis the season to be jolly… right? Depending on your vantage point and life experience, the Christmas season can be a time of immense dread or exhilarating jubilation. Whether one observes this time…
“We think we listen, but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.” ~Carl Rogers
https://medium.com/@Jonathan.Parker93/the-road-less-traveled-a-short-story-cadf60b0a992
This year was the first time I’ve attended the IUPUI Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. While I’m not new to assessment, I’ve recently stepped into this assessment management role. So obviously, I was excited to attend this year’s conference to learn more about assessment through the lens of thos…
Although the tradition of dressing in costumes and trick or treat are meant to be a fun activity for children and adults alike, the notion of celebrating things that are terrifying, menacing, or scary is the reason why I don’t particularly care for Halloween. Similarly, for those responsible for ass…
https://www.tpr.org/post/how-can-we-change-minds-about-mental-health
Mental health is something that has become more of a foci within Student Life and on college campuses nationwide. Student well-being has comprised a lot of time and planning with higher education administrators to develop evid…
In my role as an assessment expert and consultant in higher education, I have definitely experienced both professional highlights and nadirs.
These peaks, or the part of my work that I’ve found I enjoy the most, tend to occur when my colleagues and I are having a discussion first rooted in their …
“Begin with the end in mind” is a phrase all of us assessment professionals have heard often. However, this phrase carries a lot of truth as a necessary and critical aspect of assessment is evaluation. My background is in public health, and in the field of public health we utilize a specific frame…
The word vacation brings a sense of joy and invokes a positive reaction from most people. As the chorus the Madonna song, Holiday goes, “if we took a holiday… took some time to celebrate… just one day out of life; it would be… it would be so nice.” Vacation is broadly defined as a period where wor…
Higher Education is notorious for getting wrapped up in ideal images and relying solely on U.S. rankings to tell their story of impact and student success. Benchmarks, accreditation and how one institution compares to a sample of its peers has dominated our profession with our leadership and adminis…
For many of us, the summer is a time to look back at the previous year so that we can have perspective moving forward into a new academic year. In this blog entry, we will take a look back at the SAAL blogs posted so far this year (great chance to go back and read some you might have missed!) as wel…
Finally…sweet summertime! Summer is a great season to plan ahead, re-calibrate, and, for many of us, go on a much needed vacation.
Photo by Mohamed Ajufaan on Unsplash
What makes a vacation great? Is it where you go, when you go, or in planning the details? Although this can be…
Choral music has been a part of my life since I was a child. I have nostalgic, fun-speckled memories of being part of the children’s church choir, with an emphasis on volume versus quality, and can recall my excitement at being part of a comedic Gilbert and Sullivan musical as a university undergra…
Art museums. Quiet venues designed for the imagination. Places of inquiry that give you a glimpse into an artist’s creative mind.
Have you ever been to an exhibit and been captivated by the lines, shapes, forms, spacing, textures, colors, or value of the artwork? When combined with a specifi…
The big moment is here! After all your planning and hard work collecting data throughout the year, the results are in and ready to be analyzed. As you begin to dive into the results, your smile turns to a frown and you begin to feel disappointed.
These results are not what you expected or ant…
Photo credit: Renee Delgado-Riley
‘El agua es la vida,’ means ‘water is the life.’ Thus, water is a critical element for sustaining life. It is our most precious resource and we cannot control it and must leave it to Mother Nature. For generations, my ancestors lived off the land in New Mexico and…
Although many higher education institutions want to improve student success outcomes and narrow achievement gaps, they become overwhelmed with initiatives and can jump to solutions without taking a comprehensive assessment of how their institution performs against best practices. Through fifteen yea…
During an assessment planning meeting with an office, as we started to dialogue on the multiple major take-aways that students interacting with their center would have, a distinct discordance started to emerge. While one colleague clearly enjoyed expounding on the broad theoretical ways that the of…
Assessment often requires us to work backwards. We have a vision or dream of where we would like to go or what we would like to accomplish. Then, we develop our main goal (i.e. program outcome) broken down into smaller goals (i.e. student learning outcomes), and even further at times into objectiv…
