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The most basic question can also be the most difficult to answer: How do we know? In higher education, we think we’re fulfilling our mission. We’re sure students are learning and growing. We’re confident we’re achieving what we said we would. But it isn’t until we ask and answer “How do we know?” that we can unleash our college’s or university’s promise and potential.
Institutional effectiveness (IE) planning is a higher education institution’s effort to organize evaluation, assessment, and improvement initiatives so the institution can determine how well it is fulfilling its mission and achieving its goals.
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Centralizing IE efforts helps institutions get a clear picture of the institution’s performance and allows data to inform decisions. Many institutions have these efforts in siloed departments or scattered across the college or university.
IE planning also helps institutions:
IE planning is often less about starting a new process and more about bringing current, ongoing assessment processes together and empowering them. Typically, it involves:
IE planning often uses a yearly cycle with certain activities, like re-accreditation, following a multi-year process. Data are collected in an ongoing fashion, and specific reporting windows are informed by state and federal guidelines.
A review of the IE planning process usually occurs every five to 10 years but may also be triggered by:
Assessment and evaluation efforts happen in almost every unit on campus. When these efforts are siloed, they are inefficient and more focused on fulfilling external reporting obligation than on using data to improve institutional performance. Integrated planning for institutional effectiveness makes assessment more efficient and more useful to the institution.
