Assessment and Continuous Improvement
Student success is at the heart of SUNY Oneonta’s assessment and continuous improvement process. Collaborating with all academic, student experience and operational units across SUNY Oneonta, Institutional Assessment is a resource for the development and implementation of assessment techniques while ensuring consistent processes across SUNY Oneonta. Additionally, we provide ongoing support for accreditation, and state and federal compliance requirements.
SUNY Oneonta is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. “Assessment of student learning and achievement demonstrates that the institution’s students have accomplished educational goals consistent with their program of study, degree level, the institution’s mission, and appropriate expectations for institutions of higher education.”* In 2020 SUNY Oneonta adopted a New Continuous Improvement Plan. This plan outlines the process by which faculty and staff serve the critical function of synthesizing assessment reports, making connections to strategic initiatives, and providing recommendations based on the assessment findings.
Our philosophy on assessment is guided by our commitment to our students and the questions we ask to ensure quality. What are our students learning? Are our services the best they can be? The questions we ask about ourselves will vary from program to program and department to department. Whether they deal with students learning specific content, skills or attitudes or perhaps issues of student motivation and ability to monitor their own learning. Our assumption is that the key assessment questions are best known by the faculty and staff themselves. Finding ways to answer these questions is key to our student success.
Academic assessment seeks to answer the broad question, "What and how well do our students learn what we are attempting to teach them?" As such, academic assessment is not designed to evaluate individual faculty or even individual courses. It is designed to evaluate individual programs as a whole and to determine where the programs might be strengthened in order to improve our students' abilities to learn. The primary audience for academic assessments is not administrators or accrediting agencies, but, rather, the program faculty themselves.
Similarly, operational efficiency and effectiveness is the capability of SUNY Oneonta to deliver services to students in the most cost-effective manner possible while still ensuring the high quality of products and support. This is achieved by streamlining core processes in order to more effectively respond to student needs in a cost-effective manner. By focusing on continuous progression toward a meaningful but ambitious target, assessment methods are used to give feedback and guide SUNY Oneonta’s planning efforts.