September 2005

Middle States Reaccreditation Subcommittees

Davis Assesses Assessment and Finds Communication is Key

By Alita Byrd
Special to FYI Online

Cynthia Davis

Cynthia Davis, chair of the subcommittee on assessment for the upcoming Middle States accreditation review, said that UMUC’s self-study is particularly timely right now.

“With the search for a new president ongoing, it could be even more important—a document to help new leadership understand who we are and how we can stay vital as an organization,” said Davis, who serves as associate dean of academic affairs in the School of Undergraduate Studies.

Davis’s team has nearly finished its work. After dividing the 10 subcommittee members into two-person teams that each answered several of the committee’s assigned questions, reviewing the findings and collecting supporting documentation, the group drafted the chapter on assessment.

While the work of all the subcommittees has been time-consuming and each chapter had its own specific challenges to overcome in the research and writing, the subcommittee on assessment may have had one of the most challenging chapters. Since the entire Middle States review is all about assessment, it was crucial for Davis’s team to specifically identify the information they were looking for and avoid repeating information reported by other subcommittees.

“Assessment is actually integrated throughout all the Middle States standards,” said Davis. “Our area overlaps with all the others, and we had to go at the questions in a way that was not duplicative. We focused on the way assessment processes and measures are developed and on how they are communicated to the University community.”

Davis met with other subcommittee chairs on a monthly basis to hear what other subcommittees were doing. She also arranged a meeting with Javier Miyares, chair of the subcommittee on resource allocation and institutional renewal, to talk about overlaps between the two chapters.

Until last year, Davis coordinated the assessment planning for the School of Undergraduate Studies. She has an interest in the field and keeps up with trends.

“Basically, assessment means measuring our effectiveness,” Davis said. “How do we know we are accomplishing our goals and objectives? An ‘assessment culture’ is often defined as a ‘culture of evidence’—that is, we don’t take for granted that we are successful. We have to prove it in concrete ways, and we use the evidence to keep improving.”

The assessment subcommittee worked on measuring two different types of assessment: institutional assessment and assessment of student learning outcomes. “In both of those areas, our subcommittee had to identify the kinds of assessment measures UMUC uses, what we are trying to measure, and our effectiveness at developing, communicating, and using assessment results,” Davis said.

Davis said that she feels that, although the review process is difficult, it is vital to UMUC’s development. She added that she has learned a lot from the process.

“We all uncovered bits of information that really helped us see how we could connect and function more effectively,” she said. “Perhaps the biggest single area we learned about was communication. There are many more assessment activities than any one of us knew at the start—we have lots of measures of our effectiveness. But sometimes the very people who could use that information aren’t aware of it—not because it’s being kept from them, just because in this big, complicated organization the networks need to be constantly maintained. The whole Middle States process is a way of supporting that communication.”

The most difficult part of chairing the subcommittee for Davis has been finding times when the busy subcommittee members from around the world could meet. But now that the work is done, they are proud of what they have accomplished. “We all know this project is important, not just to achieve reaccreditation, but to take a look at our own health and organization so that we can continue to improve,” she said.

Davis joined UMUC in April 1998, when she decided to leave nonprofit management (she was executive director of the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals) and get back into higher education. “My job is focused on academic curriculum and policy,” Davis said. “I help develop new programs, coordinate the undergraduate catalog, and work with the academic departments on the requirements and content of their programs.”