作为校园里的学生领袖, Celina Stratton and 丹尼 Balogh were given the task of creating assessment tools to measure students’ enjoyment and growth in intramural sports and Concordia Cares, 社区服务项目.
What they didn’t expect was to make a presentation of their findings to educators at a conference in Memphis.
“They were mini-rock stars,” says George Wright, administrative dean of the School of Business. “Instructors came up afterward and said, ‘How did you do that?’”
The unusual opportunity began with a simple choice 欧文康考迪亚大学 made during its recent WASC accreditation: to allow students instead of staff to assess extracurricular and co-curricular activities and design effective surveys to evaluate student satisfaction.
“What Concordia is doing differently from other schools is getting students involved in the assessment process,塞丽娜说。, 研究大众传播和市场营销的大四学生. “而不是主管和员工评估我们, why not have the leaders of these programs do it themselves? 这是一个相当大的学习曲线来掌握, but now it’s an expectation going into student leadership that you have to complete these assessments. (其他学校的)学生们并不这么做。, which is why they felt it was worthy to have us at the conference.”
Celina created and conducted a survey to measure the overall effectiveness of intramural sports 在欧文的康考迪亚大学. Students were asked if they had improved in areas such as teamwork, 时间管理和合作能力. She graphed the results and was able to say with confidence that the intramural program improved students’ development skills.
丹尼, 工商管理专业, 是康科迪亚关怀中心的学生协调员, the community service outreach program within CUI’s Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program. She created tools to assess how students developed through the year.
“For me, assessing Concordia Cares was a big process,丹尼说. “我们是被扔进去的. 我们从调查开始.
我们更喜欢和学生口头讨论这些问题. We wanted to get statistics on how many students were actually coming, 回应率, 有多少人会回来, what they learned and which events were successful or not. We had follow-up groups to debrief about how the different events impacted them and what they had learned. 它帮助制定了下一年的计划.”
Wright says he had never seen students present at the 国际 Accreditation Council for Business Education (IACBE) conference, 但当邀请主持人的电话打来时, 他和黛博拉·李, director of 欧文康考迪亚大学’s institutional research and assessment, thought th在欧文的康考迪亚大学’s innovation merited attention—and that Celina and 丹尼 should be the ones to talk about it.
“学生这样做并不常见，”李说. “The IACBE conference is attended by professors, administrators and deans. 如果有学生参加这种类型的会议, they sit on a panel but never lead their own presentations. Celina and 丹尼 did an entire workshop on their own, thirty-five minutes by themselves. 他们很好地回答了问题.”
Celina says it was “definitely nerve-wracking to present at an accreditation conference, but the process became less intimidating because we practiced and received feedback from business educators 在欧文的康考迪亚大学. We were the only student presenters at the conference, and that alone was an awesome feeling. 我也感到受到尊重. Experienced educators were looking to us for our input. We wanted to help them just as much as they wanted to help their own students. We received a lot of positive feedback from our presentation. 这是一件很酷的事情.”
Educators were particularly interested in how to successfully set up systems so students at their institutions could conduct assessments.
“The fact that we were assessing extracurricular activities on our own was definitely surprising to them,丹尼说. “他们问了很多关于接下来会发生什么的问题, how the program would evolve and how we would keep assessing it.”
It is not common for students to do an entire [conference] workshop on their own.
Wright says 欧文康考迪亚大学’s School of Business is becoming a pacesetter for effective assessment internally and externally.
“我们已经将这个过程正式化了，而且还有很多, 更清楚了, digestible information that we can make improvements with” compared with previous years, 他说.
Putting some assessments in student hands helps students learn to “apply this in everyday life and at their job,李说.
Celina says her experience at the conference “allowed me to practice networking, 人际交往能力, 演讲技巧, 还有更多. Professors teach you about these skills in class but actually putting them to use in a real-life setting was experience you can’t have in the classroom.”
丹尼 admits that “many times I thought to myself before I got to Memphis, “我怎样才能摆脱这一切呢??“这是超级压倒性的. But once we got there it was a great feeling, very exhilarating. 我会毫不犹豫地再谈谈评估. I used to be terrified but I don’t get those jitters anymore. 这更令人兴奋.”
The pair is now collaborating on a paper to be peer-reviewed and perhaps published in an academic journal. It explains how co-curricular activities provide learning experiences beyond the classroom in a student’s overall development.