Talking Stick - September/October 2012 - 52

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cOntInued

The Importance of Assessment

a champion in Deb Boykin, assistant vice president for student affairs and director of residence life. Since 1999, she has been utilizing the ACUHO-I/ EBI assessments to effectively manage her department and has been at the forefront of the charge to develop a realistic diversity action plan for the department. Results from the assessments are shared with other offices on campus, says Dave Shepard, associate vice president of facilities management, who notes that the results allowed them to focus their energies on very specific problems: “The assessment was the most valuable tool we had in determining residents’ satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with our services. The level of detail (down to the residence hall level) provided by the assessment provided us with a better focus on specific problems and allowed us to focus our efforts in expending limited resources.” As it turns out, residence life at William & Mary continues to be a model department in the use of assessment results to shape goals for the future. At Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the residence life department routinely teaches their staff to engage with the ACUHO-I/EBI assessment results, asking questions such as “What is one thing you learned? Did anything surprise you? How do we use this data to inform our practice?” After developing the Residence Life Action Plan Focus Areas 2010-11 document, new staff were introduced to the focus areas and the action plan throughout summer training. Significant improvement has since been made within two identified focus areas, and there has been positive improvement with the third. “Prior to this cycle,” says Kathleen Gardner, associate director of residence life, “many of our staff members did not buy into our participation in the resident assessment. But now, they have evidence of how their planning and contributions positively impacted the overall housing program.”
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Renee Snider, associate director of operations for residential life at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, considers her department’s success to be the result of its strong background and passion for strategic planning, which are backed by ACUHO-I/EBI assessment results. In an effort to increase connections between students and RAs, they developed an initiative called Connections, which improved numbers in all factors measured, including Satisfaction, Hall/Apartment Programming and Learning Outcomes, and Personal Interactions. But more important, it gave the department the opportunity to teach residence life coordinators and resident assistants how the results of the ACUHO-I/EBI assessments are really used to improve campus initiatives. The residence life department at the University of Idaho in Moscow is also teaching staff to use the ACUHO-I/ EBI resident assessment results to foster relationships between RAs and their students. Results are prominently displayed on residence hall floors, where students can see that assessment results have led to such measures as implementation of no-cost laundry and prioritization of several major renovation projects and they can understand how evidence justifies the enforcement of certain measures like quiet hours. The department has even implemented a First-Year Experience program for the first-year residence hall because assessment results showed that residents consistently ranked low in time management and study skills. Craig Chatriand, assistant director for student success, says, “When our residence life team works with students, we have a snapshot of their community through the ACUHO-I/ EBI Resident Assessment and a good picture of the student we are working with.” At the University of California Riverside, the residence life department

uses its ACUHO-I/EBI assessment results to pinpoint where to focus its efforts by analyzing downward trends, most recently in the areas of Safety and Security, Sense of Community, and Personal Interactions. As a result, says James Smith, associate director for residence life, the department has been able to justify the addition of two-way radios for staff on duty, the increased presence of campus security officers in the Campus Apartments and Family Housing communities, and a shift in the organizational model to allow entry-level resident directors to be less administrative and more communitybased in their work. When prompted to discuss her department’s use of the ACUHO-I/ EBI assessment results, Joan Schmidt, associate director of residence life at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, notes the progress of their initiative to educate residents on the use and misuse of alcohol: “The surveys provide us with information, some surprising, about what our students believe and practice.” After training RAs, multicultural advisors, and peer mentor student staff utilizing the “HAZE” documentary, bringing a drunk driving simulator to campus, and presenting strategic programs addressing everything from blood alcohol content to alcohol poisoning, the department could see clear results: Residents’ mean assessment of their ability to understand the consequences of alcohol use and abuse jumped from 5.38 in 2010 to 5.48 in only two years. While the uses of assessment results range widely from campus to campus and across departments, one similarity is strikingly clear: Colleges and universities, and those that run them, rely on the ACUHO-I/EBI Benchmarking Assessments to guide them in making the right decisions to continue to improve their students’ residential experience. tS
Lisa Hickey
is the director of marketing at Educational Benchmarking, Inc. (EBI).
Talking Stick - September/October 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Talking Stick - September/October 2012
