Some student affairs practitioners find assessment too boring, while others find it too complex. Worst of all, some see it as both. But despite these perceptions, most practitioners today recognize that assessment is essential to our work. For assessment practitioners, the real challenge isn’t convincing people that assessment matters but helping them figure out how to actually do it in ways that are meaningful, manageable, and sustainable. In my work supporting student affairs professionals, I’ve found that the gap is in application, not necessarily that awareness. Practitioners often ask:
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“Where do I start?”
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“How do I fit this into my already full plate?”
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“What does good assessment look like in practice?”
These are the questions that matter most.
To bridge this gap, I turn to a favorite metaphor: vegetables. Yes, vegetables. Like assessment, vegetables are essential, often underappreciated, and best when integrated into daily life. This metaphor isn’t just a catchy way to talk about assessment. Instead, it is a practical framework for thinking about how to embed assessment into everyday practice. From planning and implementation to reflection and use, the metaphor of growing and cooking vegetables offers concrete, relatable guidance for making assessment a natural part of our professional routines.
Vegetables provide essential nutrients.
Just as vegetables supply the body with vitamins, minerals, and fiber, assessment provides the essential insights needed to make well-informed decisions. Assessment is a core competency of the student affairs profession, present in the NASPA/ACPA competencies and in guiding documents of the field, such as ACPA’s Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs. Essential in student affairs, assessment provides the nourishment necessary to help improve programs, services, and overall student experiences. By systematically evaluating student outcomes and program effectiveness, practitioners can ensure their decisions are based on evidence rather than assumptions or biases. Additionally, assessment allows student affairs professionals to track progress toward essential institutional goals, such as student engagement, retention, and success.
Vegetables support long-term health.
Eating vegetables is an investment in long-term health, even when immediate benefits are not always obvious. Just as vegetables help prevent health issues, strong assessment plans prevent costly mistakes and risks. Developing strong assessment and evaluation plans may take time to show their full impact, but they lead to better outcomes, more informed strategies, and fewer mistakes. While instinct may yield short-term results, using data provides a more sustainable, resilient path for long-term growth and success.
Anyone can grow a vegetable.
Professional farmers or novice gardeners can both nurture a garden. Similarly, anyone can be a data and assessment person. Amelia Parnell, in their 2021 book You Are A Data Person, argues that everyone has unique abilities to offer as a data-informed practitioner. Further, in their 2022 article describing a multi-level leadership model for student affairs assessment, Heather Strine-Patterson highlights that student affairs practitioners at all levels of an organization have an important role to play in student affairs assessment.
This metaphor isn’t just catchy. It is also instructive. Vegetables aren’t just good for you in theory; they’re most beneficial when incorporated into your daily meals in ways that are sustainable, enjoyable, and tailored to your needs. The same is true for assessment. Let’s consider how this metaphor can help guide practitioners.
Tending Your Garden
First, start small and build habits. You likely wouldn't plan an acre of zucchini on your first try, and you don’t need to launch a full-scale assessment project for everything you work on to begin improving your assessment practice. Start with one program or initiative. Ask a simple question like, “What do we want students to learn or experience here?” and “How will we know if that’s happening?” These simple, reflective questions can help lay a foundation to build on and help you build the skills you need as you start to scale your vegetable garden...I mean assessment practice.
Second, growing vegetables takes planning and patience. A gardener must carefully plan the types of vegetables, the amount of produce they hope to harvest, the type of soil available, the location of the plants in relation to the sun, and the amount of water and other nutrients each. As Catherine Palomba and Trudy Banta described in the 2014 Assessment Essentials book, assessment cycles are more than just data collection; they require purposeful planning and goal clarification. A gardener’s process takes patience and adjustment over time. They may appreciate one of Parnell’s rules for working with data: do not rush.
A thriving garden depends not only on planting and tending, but also on timely harvesting and thoughtful application. Like unharvested vegetables left to wither on the vine, assessment and evaluation processes lose their value if not actively used. Educators must have a plan for what to do with their yield. Without one, the fruits of their labor may go to waste. When insights are not used, their potential impact is lost. Jessica Jonson (2014) and colleagues note that many practitioners hold a narrow view of what "use" means, often believing it must result in immediate and observable change. This limited perspective can leave staff feeling unsure or constrained in their actions. There are many ways assessment can support and improve practice. Parnell (2021) identifies at least twenty different ways to apply results to strengthen programs, enhance services, and address student needs. Just as gardeners need a plan for how to make the most of their harvest, practitioners need a strategy for how they will use results and must follow through to ensure those efforts bear fruit.
Cooking Your Vegetables
Vegetables are best in a medley. Just as a healthy diet requires balance, so does decision-making. Focusing on a single metric can throw off the balance, much like eating only one type of vegetable deprives the body of a full range of nutrients. Increasingly, incorporating multiple and mixed approaches is considered a best practice, given the ways it supports equity in assessment cycles. According to Erick Montenegro and Natasha Jankowski’s seminal piece on embedding equity into assessment praxis, using multiple sources of evidence is one way in which practitioners can check biases and increase intentionality. A diverse set of data points, whether from surveys, analytics, or feedback, helps ensure a well-rounded, balanced approach to decision-making. Think of triangulating results across various methods as an opportunity to build the perfect salad. The medley of flavors complements one another, combining to create something better as a sum than as individual parts.
Chefs have suggested recipes for making vegetables their best. These established ways to prepare vegetables for maximum enjoyment mirror proven methods for designing meaningful, educationally effective cocurricular interventions and proven methods for designing and implementing effective data collection strategies. When these methods are followed, the results are stronger. This aspect of the metaphor touches on an often-overlooked aspect of assessment in student affairs: implementation fidelity. Implementation fidelity refers to whether a student is experiencing a program as intended or whether there has been some “drift.” Jerusha Gerstner and Sara Finney’s 2013 article on implementation fidelity explains that in student affairs, questions of drift are often not top of mind for student affairs professionals. When a cook drifts from a chef’s recipe, the quality of the dish may suffer. It is the cook’s responsibility to be aware of the changes or take the time to discover which steps were omitted or implemented differently. The same can happen to student affairs programs and services. Without assessment processes that help to monitor such drifts, student affairs practitioners can be challenged to make premature judgements about program quality.
Vegetables should be more than garnish. Vegetables make appearances in meals in a variety of ways. Garnish on the side of the plate technically meets the requirement that vegetables are part of the meal; however, vegetables are most effective when they’re a substantial part of everyday meals, not just special occasions. Similarly, assessment should be made a part of everyday routines, "baked into” regular planning, reflection, and team meetings. For example, after an event, take 10 minutes to discuss what went well, what didn’t, and what evidence supports those conclusions. Assessment can’t just be an add-on, garnishing the side of our programs and services. Gavin Henning, in a 2015 chapter on cultivating a culture of assessment, argues that assessment should not be viewed as an extra task. Instead, it should be thoughtfully embedded within the activity, becoming an integral and seamless part of the overall process. Practitioners must take the time to proactively plan how assessment cycles can be integrated and embedded into program processes.
myplate.gov healthy plate
A good meal is best when shared with others, just like results. In order to promote maximum use, it's critical for practitioners to consider sharing vertically and horizontally within their organization and with other key collaborators. In Jankowski and Marshall’s book Degrees that Matter: Moving higher education to a learning systems paradigm, they explain that collaboration supports the process of constructing shared understanding by helping all individuals responsible for student learning within the institution reach a common agreement on its collective goals and purpose.
When preparing a meal for others, sharing the ingredients included is an important step in avoiding allergic reactions and being sure to accommodate all dietary restrictions. Results should be clearly and transparently shared with staff collaborators and student participants throughout phases of the assessment cycle. Transparency involves clearly sharing goals, outcomes, assessment plans, and results with constituents and, as Jankowski and Lindquist’s describe in Reframing Assessment to Center Equity, transparency in assessment is essential for student-centered, equity-focused assessment practices as it aids students in understanding and meeting expectations. Movements to more transparent assessment processes are closely related to movements towards increasing student involvement with assessment. How can we know whether we’re supporting students if we aren’t involving students in developing goals, coming up with meaningful and authentic ways to evaluate our programs and services, and involving students in discussions about the results and next steps?
So what?
Next time you are considering the importance of assessment in higher education, consider the simple yet powerful metaphor: “We need vegetables.” Ultimately, while some may resist vegetables, most agree that they are essential for survival. The role of assessment in student affairs is similarly non-negotiable. The purpose of assessment in student affairs is about nourishment, not perfection: The goal is to learn so that in turn, you can improve the student experience. Assessment should help you make better decisions, refine your programs, and ultimately enhance student learning and development. Just like tending a garden or cooking a good meal, assessment requires care, intention, and follow-through. With the right mindset and a willingness to practice, every student affairs professional can be an effective assessment practitioner. The metaphor helps us get there… but the real work begins when we apply it.
This blog post was written by Emily Braught, Director of Assessment and Planning, Division of Student Affairs, Indiana University.
References
Banta, T. W., & Palomba, C. A. (2014). Assessment essentials: Planning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education. John Wiley & Sons.
Gerstner, J. J., & Finney, S. J. (2013). Measuring the implementation fidelity of student affairs programs: A critical component of the outcomes assessment cycle. Research & Practice in Assessment, 8, 15-28.
Henning, G. W. (2015). Tenet two: Cultivating a culture of assessment. In Yousey-Elsener, Bentrim, and Henning’s (Eds.) Coordinating student affairs divisional assessment (pp. 11-34). Routledge.
Jankowski, N.A & Lundquist, A.E. (2022). Equity and assessment. In Henning, G. W., Baker, G. R., Jankowski, N. A., Lundquist, A. E., & Montenegro, E. (Eds.). (2022). Reframing assessment to center equity: Theories, models, and practices. Taylor & Francis Group.
Jankowski, N. A., & Marshall, D. W. (2017). Degrees that matter: Moving higher education to a learning systems paradigm. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Jonson, J. L., Guetterman, T., & Thompson Jr, R. J. (2014). An Integrated Model of Influence: Use of Assessment Data in Higher Education. Research & Practice in Assessment, 9, 18-30.
Montenegro, E., & Jankowski, N. A. (2020). A new decade for assessment: Embedding equity into assessment praxis. Occasional Paper No. 42. National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.
Parnell, A. (2021). You are a data person: Strategies for using analytics on campus. Routledge.
Schuh, J. H., & Gansemer-Topf, A. M. (2010). Assessment in student affairs: A guide for practitioners. Jossey-Bass.
Strietzel, J., Kaul, C. R., & Sriram, R. (2020). Overall effectiveness of a student affairs scholar practitioner workshop: A mixed methods study. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 57(4), 441-456.
Strine‐Patterson, H. J. (2022). Assessment is a leadership process: The multilevel assessment process. New Directions for Student Services, 2022(178-179), 61-76.