Talking Stick - September/October 2017 - 41

stantial number of surveys would have
to be recorded. The data entry for the
survey took so long that, even though
it was completed in April, it took until
November for all the responses to be
entered. Marie finally received her report in December of the following year,
and, while the information was valuable, she received it too late to act on it
to implement any significant changes.
Marie's department also required
the RAs to meet with their residents
twice a semester. This was a way for
student leaders to get to know their
residents on a one-on-one basis. In addition, the RAs wrote down residents'
responses to their pre-determined
questions in a slick, glossy book. When
she asked what hall directors did with
that data, Marie learned that they read
through the responses after the first
round of meetings. After that, though,
it became too much to deal with in
the midst of all the student crises and

other day-to-day operations and was
largely ignored. As more time passed,
Marie repeatedly found data collection
in her department to be spotty, haphazard, and even fabricated. She had
year-end reports that were completed
too late to improve practice, individual
student data collected that would never
be used, and very little information
that actually could help her make
strategic decisions for the department.
The year-end survey could have been
helpful retrospectively, but it did not allow for changes in practice that would
help current students. It provided an
outline, but the full, finished picture
was left to the imagination. Marie
believed she must find a better way.
She knew that technology could
assist her as the student activities
department used a card-swipe system,
where students would swipe their IDs
in a card reader at individual events.
That data could then be loaded into a

spreadsheet that would eliminate cases
of event organizers over-estimating the
number of participants. Additionally,
she would know who actually attended
the events and, nearly as important,
who did not.
As Marie thought further, she
realized that staff and students were already completing programming forms,
mostly as planning documents for
logistics. What if those programming
forms also included the departmental
outcomes that targeted the program?
And what if those two pieces of information - the residents who attended
the program and the program goals
- were linked? What if the department
employed that process for all the programs? It would yield useful information such as whether the outcomes
were being addressed in a strategic,
targeted, and sequenced way. As an
example, because the university had a
large percentage of students from out

Shape the

Inspired

WASSAJA HALL | UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
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SEPTEMBER + OCTOBER 2017
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Talking Stick - September/October 2017

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