The document discusses reimagining assessment as a high-impact practice at the University of Richmond, emphasizing the need to reclaim assessment ownership among staff and faculty and to focus on process rather than just outcomes. It encourages collaborative inquiry and reflection on civic engagement values. Key grounding ideas include reclaiming assessment, looking beyond immediate outcomes, and aligning assessment practices with core values.

1. Reimagining &
Reclaiming Assessment
as a High-Impact Practice
Bryan Figura & Dr. Sylvia Gale
University of Richmond
Bonner Center for Civic Engagement

2. Goals
• Reclaim assessment as something we do and
own
• Reimagine assessment in the context of the
values we already hold in our community-
engaged work

3. Grounding Idea 1:
Reclaiming Assessment

4. Assessment and Me
Oh yay! Oh no!
Cause I wanna Cause I hafta
Big ol’ grin Big ol’ yawn
I can do this! It’s just all too much!
They pay people to do this? You couldn’t pay me to do this!
Makes me remember how good it is to be alive! Makes want to pull my hair out!

5. What if assessment were a
high-impact practice?
• Involves meaningful effort
• Helps staff and faculty build substantive relationships with each
other
• Engages staff and faculty across differences
• Provides staff and faculty with rich feedback about their work
• Helps staff and faculty apply and test what they are learning
about student learning to their programming and teaching
• Provides opportunities for staff and faculty to reflect on the
people their students are becoming

6. What difference could reimagining
assessment as a high-impact
practice make to you?

7. What gets in the way of
your reimagining
assessment this way?

8. Grounding Idea 2:
Beyond Outcomes

9. In some ways, the product of our work—in the form of
successfully executed community projects—is less a part of
our conceptualization of the change we pursue than is the
process by which it happens…The product (completed
project) is the immediate outcome, but our mission is furthered
more by the processes we seek to engender.
The true impact of building social capital and increased
neighborhood involvement in civic work, for example, is
notoriously difficult to measure and often takes time to manifest,
and so we often succumb to citing impacts such as the number
of trees planted, the miles of bike lanes added, or the number of
children engaged in a project as short term, product-based
measures. In doing so, we run the risk of conflating--indeed,
displacing--process values and impacts with product values
and impacts, which can undermine the fundamental
conversations and orientations to change we are trying to
catalyze.
—Whitney, Edwards, Harrison, Muse, & Clayton, under development

10. Assessment and the BCCE
Develop
programs based
on evidence
Measure learning
Build a culture of inquiry

11. In Data Labs…
...stakeholders with a common investment (in a
program, center, class, experience, etc.) come together
to look carefully at artifacts (data) that emerge from the
program, and to ask a series of guided questions about
these artifacts.
• What are we learning about (focus of the data lab)
from this data?
• What do we wish we knew? or, What does the data not
tell us that we want to know?

12. Example: Pensieve
Pick one essay and read it. The assignment in this
class was for students to notice something at their
service site that raised a biochemical question that they
could answer while researching biochemical literature.
Using the pensieve worksheet, draw a picture of the
moment that you see in the pensive (in the student
essay), in which the student identifies the connection to
biochemistry.

15. Data Lab #1 (May 2011)
What else do we wish we knew?
• How can we track students across programs and across years?
• What are students’ own learning goals?
• Are there connections between programs and partners (tracking
relationships with partners)?
• What are faculty’s experience and reflections?
• What are students’ majors in the BCCE orbit?
• What is the connection between the experience and the class and
how students make that connection?
• What are the community-identified needs we are working on with
partners?

16. Data Lab #11 (June 2014)
What else do we wish we knew?
• What motivates the large percentage of first generation and minority
participants?
• What are demographics of students awarded Federal Work Study?
• What are men doing? How can we understand this gender imbalance?
• How can we understand the under-representation of the business
school in BCCE programs?
• What is the connection between how people were advised and what
happened for them? Can we track students advised/relationship to
program participation?
• What is the breakdown of students in the BCCE orbit by school and
year?

17. What happens when our focus
beyond outcomes comes into
conflict with our institution’s desire
for outcomes?

18. Grounding Idea 3:
Walking the talk of our
values

19. ASSESSMENT VALUES
Generative (forward
looking)
Collaborative (shared
inquiry)
Practicable (can it be
done?)
Rigorous (does our data
have integrity)
BCCE VALUES
Lifelong learning
Collaboration
Full Participation
Intentionality

20. What is one value that
grounds you in your civic
engagement work?

21. Pose these questions to your
own work
• How am I walking the talk of (insert value) in
assessment? or How could I walk the talk of
(insert value) in assessment?
• What gets in the way of that?

22. Grounding Ideas
1) Reclaiming assessment
2) Beyond outcomes
3) Walking the talk of our values