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Purdue Fort Wayne Quality Initiative – HLC Assessment Academy
In 2015, HLC accepted IPFW’s (now Purdue Fort Wayne) application to participate in the Assessment Academy to fulfil the requirements for the Quality Initiative. The original proposal focused on assessing three areas of general education – written communication, oral communication, and quantitative reasoning. However, the proposal was modified in the initial Academy Roundtable to emphasize the development of programmatic assessment for all departments and programs.
The revised Assessment Academy Project, “Institutionalizing Assessment in a Culture of Student Success” focused on the implementation of the new Academic Program Assessment Plan with a secondary focus on continued assessment of general education courses and evaluation of the program to begin the process of revising general education. The University Assessment Council began work on a new assessment plan concurrent with the beginning of participation in the Assessment Academy. Upon completing the first draft, the Council shared the plan in a series of town halls across all academic units to receive input and recommendations. A final assessment plan was submitted it to the University Senate’s Educational Policy Committee for consideration by Faculty Senate. The Senate approved Senate Document 15-6 on October 16, 2015 approving the new Assessment Plan. The plan was implemented in the 2015-16 Academic Year. In the first year of implementation, all academic programs were required to develop new or review existing Program Learning Outcomes, map those outcomes to core courses required of all students, align appropriate outcomes to the Baccalaureate Framework as part of the institutional assessment of student learning plan, and develop a plan for measuring student achievement relative to the stated outcomes. The requirements for the assessment plan included developing direct and indirect measures for all SLO’s, implementing a three year assessment cycle to ensure that all outcomes are assessed within that timeframe, evaluate assessment findings to propose actions to improve student learning based on the assessment findings, and reporting findings of assessment results including the assessment of changes made as a result of prior assessments each year to the program’s College Assessment Committee. The College Assessment Committee reviews the program assessment reports, provides feedback to the academic program, prepares a College Assessment Report summarizing findings across all academic programs, and submits a College Level Report to the University Assessment Council for review. Program and College Annual Assessment Reports are posted on the University’s assessment website.
The General Education Revision process was initiated based on an assessment of the general education program that was conducted in early 2015. As described in the 2015-16 Evaluation of General Education Assessment at IPFW, the design of the current general education program and its implementation created a scenario in which general education at the institution was more a list of distribution requirements than a cogent and coherent general education program. An initial general education program and assessment revision plan was presented to Deans through the Academic Officers Committee, to faculty in town hall meetings, and to academic chairs in the Colleges in 2018. An evaluation survey was developed for feedback on the proposal and that feedback was provided to the General Education Subcommittee of Faculty Senate. The committee began work on revisions to the plan in the 2019 Spring Semester and completed the new proposal at the end of 2019 Fall Semester. The plan was to present the new plan to Faculty in the Spring Semester of 2020. The COVID pandemic delayed the presentation of the plan to Faculty to Fall Semester 2020 with an anticipated presentation to Faculty Senate at the end of semester and implementation of the new plan in the 2021 Fall Semester.
PFW completed its participation in the Assessment Academy in July 2019. Following are links that describe our feedback on the project, the panel review of the project, and the Academy Teams final report.
Quality Initiative Report Panel Review