Lesson 2: Developing a Communications Plan
The last step in developing an assessment plan is determining how you will communicate the results to faculty, administrators, students and accrediting bodies. In determining how you will communicate the assessment report you need to think about the following:
- Who are your audiences?
- How will each audience use the information, i.e. what types of decisions will each audience be making based on the information?
- What specific information will each audience need to be given to make the decisions they will be making?
- How do you present the information in a way that is simple and easy to understand?
Key Audiences for Assessment Results
File:Audiences for Assessment (1).pdf
How to Present the Assessment Information
There are a few best practices to consider when deciding how you want to present the assessment information to each audience. They are as follows:
- Tell a story - don't just compile a data dump. Remember to keep in mind that each audience has different information needs and the assessment story that is told needs to address those needs.
- Focus on what is most important for each audience and eliminate extraneous information that might be "nice" to know but will not help the audience in their decision-making.
- Create user-friendly, easy to understand visuals and graphics to summarize the key data points.
- According to Linda Suskie in Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense, optimal formats include the following:
- Stacked Bar Graphs: Best way to share evidence from rubrics because it is easy to see proportion of students who received scores in each performance level in for each criterion.
- Line Graphs: Great way to show historical trending data.
- Pie Graphs: Another good way to show proportions of students at each performance level for each criterion.
- Tables: Works well for showing detailed data that you want to compare against each other. Helps viewer to get a clear picture of how students are doing in all performance levels in all criteria of a specific SLO.
- Bulleted List: Good for highlighting important points.
- Infographics: combines visuals and text to provide the key information that tells the whole assessment story.
- Dashboards: Good way to visually provide the key performance indicators all in one place. They should be designed so that the key points can be understood in one glance.
- Keep it short, simple and clear. People don't have a lot of time to wade through tones of data points. The assessment report should convey the necessary information in a way that is quick and easy to understand. It should focus on giving its audience what they need most to make key decisions and no more.
- Have a defined schedule for when and how the assessment information will be communicated. For example, will it be a written report that is emailed to its audience by a specific date, or will it be a presentation given at a school or department meeting, or will it be posted to the department or college website or will there be another way the information is transferred to its audience.