Abstract
No Survey? No Problem! In the fast-paced, community-centered world of Residence Life, traditional surveys often fall short of capturing the real learning, growth, and engagement happening in our halls. This session introduces housing professionals to a practical—and surprisingly fun—toolkit of creative assessment methods designed specifically for the realities of Res Life work. Together, we’ll explore easy-to-adopt strategies that help you understand what students are actually learning outside the classroom. You’ll see how these methods can generate richer insights, build stronger assessment narratives, and support data-informed decision-making without adding hours to your workload. Whether you’re assessment-curious or looking to expand your existing practice, this webinar will leave you inspired, confident, and ready to tell your learning story—no surveys required.
Outcomes
- Identify at least two non-survey assessment methods (e.g., observational snapshots, engagement mapping, reflective prompts) that can be implemented easily within Residence Life environments.
- Apply a low-lift assessment strategy to a real or hypothetical Res Life scenario to better understand student learning and engagement outside the classroom.
- Explain how alternative assessment tools can generate meaningful insights and strengthen learning-focused narratives that guide data-informed decision-making.
Presenters
- Amanda R. Knerr (she/her/hers)
Date Of Recording: 12/17/25
Watch the Video:
Links and References:
Roompact produces a monthly series of free webinars on residence life practice. Live webinars are exclusive to Roompact schools, but recordings of most webinars are made publicly available for the benefit of all.
Transcript:
All right. Well, it is so good to see all of you here today. Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Roompact webinar. We’re so glad that you could join us today. My name is Amanda Knerr and I’ll be your host and also your feature presenter for today’s session. Before we get started though, I have a few quick reminders and some announcements for you. First of all, jobs at Roompact Schools. If you want some extra help getting some eyeballs on your open positions, we maintain a jobs board for Roompact Schools on our page. This is one of our most visited pages and we periodically share it in the software and on our social media channels. To add your job, we just ask that you send the link to support our roommpact.com and you would be all set, so I’m going to put that in the comments. If you have a job that you would like posted, send the email there and we will add that for you and for your campus. We also are going to be having an RA bulletin board contest.
Our new quarterly contest for student staff allows us to highlight great bulletin boards and allow staff to be recognized with a small gift from Roompact. Don’t forget to encourage your student staff to submit theirs today and they can send that to contest@roompact.com and we will get that added as well. We are currently hiring the next round of our annual bloggers, so if you are interested in joining us as a Roompact blogger, please submit your application today, they are open until January 30th. And finally last piece of announcements, our R2 conference registration and program proposals are open and live now. Please consider joining us for R2, Roompact and Residence Life Conference, it’s brand new. It’s going to be October in Anaheim, California. All details can be found in a link at the top of the roompact.com homepage. We hope to see you there in October. Before we get started with content today, a few housekeeping items.
Number one, today’s session will be recorded and the recording is going to be available on the roompact.com website within just the next few days, so if you want to access it or take a look at it again in the future or share it with others on your campus, please feel free to access it there. All participants are going to be muted to start off today. That helps us minimize background noise. And then if you have a question or if there’s a opportunity for discussion later on, you can unmute yourself at that time and speak. If you experience any technical difficulties throughout the webinar today please reach out to let us know via the chat feature, and I’ll do my best to pause and make sure we can get that squared away so you can participate throughout the duration of the webinar. And finally, throughout the session, please feel free to submit your questions or comments in the chat. As both your host and your presenter today, I’ll be doing my best to monitor both, but we’ll definitely save time at the end to make sure that we answer any of your questions.
Today’s session is going to be about no survey, no problem, creative tools for a smarter assessment in Residence Life. Excited to chat with you today, and I’m going to take just a minute to share my screen so that you can see the content. Let’s see here. All right. I just want to make sure, can all of you see the PowerPoint slide? Perfect. Excellent. We’ll go ahead and get started then. Let me see if I can get this moving. All right. Again, today’s content is all about assessment and what are some things you can do for assessment besides the typical surveys. I think we’re all really familiar with quality of life, the NESC, large scale surveys, all of that. And so today what we’re really trying to talk about is what are some things we can do besides just our surveys? At the end of this session, if I’m successful, you will be able to talk about at least two non-survey assessment methods that you can try in Housing and Residence Life in the next year.
Most of these you could walk out of your office right now, walk down the hallway to a residence hall lounge and put it into place with just minutes of prep work. We’re also going to talk about some low lift assessment strategies and some real and hypothetical res life scenarios, so you can think about student learning, student engagement a little differently than you might have in the past. And finally, we’re going to talk about how do you share that assessment information? You’ve collected your data, whether it be a survey or some of these non-survey techniques. Now, how do I share that information with my team or with external campus partners in ways that matter that are interesting and that can help guide evidence-based decision making? Let’s get started. When I think about assessment, what I’d like you to do is just put in the chat, how many of you say, “Yeah, I’m an assessment expert. I have no problems with assessment. I geek out on the data. I love it.” And then how many of you are like, “I’m terrified of assessment. It makes me really nervous. I don’t like to do it.”
And then where are those folks that are in the middle that are like, “I’ll do it. I’m interested in it, but I don’t really know where to get started.” Throw it in the chat just to find out who’s joining us today and where to focus some time. I’ve got a couple assessment nerds. I’ve got some folks in the middle. Do I have anyone that’s like terrified, terrified, what do I do? Looks like we’ve got a few nerds and a few folks in the middle and nobody that seems to be completely terrified of assessment. That’s great. That’s great. I’m going to start a little bit… Well, first of all, let’s start with this little cartoon. I love this. And I taught Stripe how to whistle. And then they said, “I didn’t hear him whistling.” And he says, “I said I taught him to whistle. I didn’t say he learned it.” And I think that’s a lot of assessment. We spend a lot of time with our students hoping they’re picking things up. We’re hoping they’re learning different things.
We’re hoping they’re doing things, but if we don’t collect any assessment data or any information, we have no way to prove yes, they actually learned it. They’re doing what we hope that… They’re getting what we hope that they’re getting out of the assessment and the activities and the engagement strategies we’re using in our residence halls. Today what I hope that we’ll do is we’ll talk about not only how do we present and how do we create engaging opportunities for students in our halls, but then how do we prove? How do we gather information that demonstrates that they’re learning exactly what we want them to learn? Let’s talk a little bit first about what does this look like? First of all, we can spend a lot of time doing assessment. We can assess on all sorts of things. And it’s really easy, particularly if you’re an assessment geek like I am, to gather all sorts of data. Before we do that, I’d encourage you to pause and say, how are we going to use this information?
Because a lot of times what we do is we gather all sorts of things because it’s interesting and not necessarily because it’s useful. How many of you sit on assessment committees and it’s very easy in those conversations to say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be neat to know or don’t we think we should ask X, Y, Z?” I know that’s me. We can sit around and the next thing we know, we have 500 questions to ask students of which only five of them will actually be useful for us that we’ll actually be able to use to change our practice, to make better decisions. An example that I like to use is not around learning. At a previous campus we would do an annual quality of life survey and at the end and in that quality of life survey, we started asking them if they were satisfied with the housing rates for a single room on campus. Well, I don’t know about you all, but on our campus our students have no say in what the rates are for a single room or double room or any housing rates on campus.
We gather information, we talk and we look at what our peer competitors and what their rates are, what our local marketplace rates are. And then I have to put a proposal before the board of trustees that either says, yes, we approve these rates or nope, go back to the drawing board, so why on earth would I ask students, “Are you satisfied with the housing rates?” Knowing full well that I’m not going to be able to change those rates if they’re not satisfied anyways. It makes them frustrated, “Why are you asking me? You’re not going to adjust it?” And it isn’t any useful information, so I stopped asking that question and only ask questions that were actually going to be useful or questions that I could take that information, make a decision, make a change, and then share it with our students. And so that’s the first thing that I’d say. As you’re thinking about assessment, what is data that’s going to be useful? What is going to be data that’s interesting? Otherwise, it’s going to end up as a paperweight on your desk or just being collecting desk.
We want it to be useful. If we’re going to do the assessment, let’s make sure we’re using it. Now let’s talk about the different types of assessment. The first type is a direct assessment. And oftentimes when we’re talking about assessment, we’re talking about indirect assessments. Direct assessments are where we are actually looking at a student and saying, “Show me how you do X, Y, or Z. Show me how you do multiplication. Oh, you got these multiplication problems wrong, you haven’t learned what we wanted you to learn.” This is actually putting our eyeballs on a student and watching their behavior to see if their knowledge, their skills or their behavior has changed. And we can see that it’s changed and aligned with our learning outcomes that we set at the beginning of an assessment. This is, I want you to be able to do multiplication, here’s a multiplication test. You get a 90% on this multiplication test.
That’s a direct assessment of your learning. You’re good to go. You have mastered the multiplication tables. An indirect assessment is where we’re asking a student to say ,”Tell me how you think you’ve learned in relation to this particular topic.” If the topic is, we want to assess how well students understand and follow our alcohol policy. Then we might ask a student, “Student, tell me how well you think you know our alcohol policy and how your behaviors might align or not align with that policy.” We’re asking the students to weigh in. I’m not observing their behavior. That would be an indirect measure of assessment of learning. Both direct measures and indirect measures are important and interesting and worthwhile, but they’re two different things. Oftentimes in academia, our faculty partners are asking for direct learning and direct learning assessment. Oftentimes in the co-curricular environment, we’re looking at indirect measures of assessment. We’re asking students to weigh in on their learning, to reflect on their learning.
One of the reasons why I point out direct versus indirect measures of assessment is because it’s really important as we’re thinking about how we’re assessing student learning to think about who our audience is going to be. If we’re going to present the audience back to our faculty partners, to deans of colleges, even to the board of trustees, we’re probably going to want to make sure that some of that learning assessment we’re gathering is direct observation, is direct assessments. If we’re sharing it with other co-curricular learning partners, other folks in the Division of Student Affairs, our own team, our student staff, then using some of our students’ own indirect measures or reflections of their own learning are okay and appropriate. Oftentimes when I’m putting an assessment report together that I’m sharing with our audience, I’m using both, what are the direct measures? What are those indirect measures to flesh out the assessment measure? All right, so we’ve talked about direct measures. We’ve talked about indirect measures. What else? Let’s talk about very briefly, let’s talk about formative versus summative assessment.
Formative assessment is happening during the learning process. If you think of being a student in a classroom and the faculty member is lecturing, and then about halfway through the class, they might do a pull everywhere, “Hey, get out your phones. I want you to answer this question on the screen. What is nine times six? Oh, is that 54? Great. You know it.” That’s a formative assessment. That’s happening throughout the learning engagement and it’s helping us assess whether folks are picking up what we want them to pick up as we’re in the moment. A summative assessment is happening at the end. Think your final exam, your cumulative exam at the end of the semester. That is summative. The semester’s over, did you learn everything we wanted you to learn over the course of the semester? It might be a lot of times quality of life is happening towards the end of the year. Talk about your experience living on campus for the last nine months and tell me how it was. That’s a summative assessment at the end.
And it allows us to look at, was the whole event or engagement strategy successful? Was your living experience on campus good, positive, negative? It’s looking back. Again, a formative assessment is happening in the moment, it’s while the learning is happening. A summative assessment is happening after the engagement activities happened at the end, looking back over it. All right, so both formative and summative assessments are important, so as you’re thinking about, you’re developing your assessment strategy with your students, think about those assessments that need to happen in the moment as things are happening. And then that end of the year, end of the activity, end of the program assessment that’s looking back and summative to help you really refine your programs and services. Oh, all right. And then the last one, and you’re probably thinking, why are we talking about learning versus customer satisfaction? I have found that in Housing and Residence Life, we use these words interchangeably, and that is often not the case. It is often… It’s almost never the case. They’re two different things.
When we are assessing students learning, we’re trying to figure out if their knowledge, their skills, or their behaviors have changed, and if they have achieved a learning outcome. I have learned how to define personal wellbeing for myself. That is a learning assessment. Customer satisfaction is, “Hey, I really liked this program on wellbeing I attended at nine o’clock in the lounge. Thanks for doing that.” That is a satisfaction assessment. It has nothing to do with learning. Oftentimes we say, “This is how many people showed up at an event,” not a learning assessment. Or you know what? When they showed up at the event and they loved it and they want to do it again next year, great information that isn’t learning. Again, as you’re reporting your assessments back to your director, to your vice president for student affairs, to external audiences, you need to think about what do they want to know? Do they want to know how satisfied your students are with your programs, events and services, or do they want to know what students are learning or gaining from the experience in your halls?
Oftentimes reporting both is important. You want your students to be satisfied with their experience on campus, but you also want them to learn and grow, so as you’re thinking about developing your assessment, think both. All right. Let’s talk about learning for just a minute. Learning is so messy. We like to think that they’re going to sit down, they’re going to learn what nine times six is, and then from thereafter, they are always going to know what nine times six is. That’s not how learning happens. Let’s think back when my kids were little and I taught them how to tie their shoe, I had to teach them 10 different ways before they figured out how to tie their shoe. My one kid, I showed them one time, they were forever able to do it. Great. For my other kid, I had to show him the rabid ears approach. I had to show him around the block and through the whole approach. There were about 10 different ways I had to show him before he figured out how to tie his shoe. I have a kid that to this day can hardly tie a shoe.
He’s in college now and he still prefers pull on shoes because he always forgets how to tie his shoe, so learning is messy. Each student is going to learn a little differently, and oftentimes they’re going to make lots of different connections to learn a particular topic or engagement. You’re probably thinking, what does this have to do with residence hall assessment? Well, the first thing I would say is, in Housing and Residence Life we want to say, because of what we did, this is what a student has learned. And the truth of the matter is when we’re talking about learning outside of the classroom, it probably isn’t solely because Housing and Residence Life did something that they’re learning something. We can’t take full ownership of it, nor should we try. And in fact, I would say we’re doing our students a disservice if we’re saying, “We’re the only ones that can teach you this.”
In fact, what we want students to do is we want them to experience all different types of learning in their housing environment and then to say, “Oh yeah, I can take this to my student organization and I can apply it there and I’m going to add some things in that student organization that’s going to add to that learning. And then I’m going to take it into my leadership class and I’m going to apply a couple more things and take it there. And then I’m going to take it to my student employment and I’m going to add some things and I’m going to add on to that learning and take it there.” Learning is messy in that, particularly in our co-curricular learning environment, because it’s not just a one and done. It’s not that everything that I teach them in the residence hall is the only place they’re going to learn that. Learning is messy in that they’re taking lots of pieces of learning from all over campus and creating their learned experience and are growing and developing as young adults.
And so as we’re assessing student learning, we’re often not assessing causation. Because of this, they picked up this, but we’re assessing in general. Some of these strategies we’re doing are adding to their learning, and these are the ways in which we’ve seen behavior change, and these are the ways in which we’re contributing to that learning. When we’re reporting assessment out, it’s often important to not say, “Because of this, because of this particular event, this learning occurred, but these are ways in which we’re contributing to the learning environment.” And so that’s what I’m talking about when I’m saying there’s an imperfect world of assessing learning. There’s all different ways to do this. And so oftentimes as we’re thinking about assessment, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take little photographs along the way, and then over the course of the year, we’re going to put those photos in an album, and then we’re going to take that photo album of 2025, 2026 and say, “These is how we’ve contributed to student learning on campus.”
The way I like to explain it to my team is, “Hey, we’re going to do some assessments of learning after the first floor meeting, and we’re going to take some assessments of learning during our Living Learning Community Kickoff events. And we’re going to do an assessment of student learning in Rock the Halls, which is one of our welcome week events. And we’re going to take all of those assessments and we’re going to put it together, and that’s going to be our photo album of Weeks of Welcome.” And then we’re going to do it to the next thing, and the next thing is going to be our midterm events and activities, or our fall semester events and activities. And we’re going to take some assessments of learning in those fall semester, and that’s going to be the photo album of our fall semester. And then we’re going to do the kickoff week for spring semester, and that’s going to be another photo album. And at the end of 2025, ’26, we’re going to take all of those photo albums together and say, “Here is the overarching learning that’s happened throughout the year.”
As we’re thinking about the imperfect world of assessing learning, what I want you to think about are, what is the assessment I need to do for this event, for this activity, the snapshot of learning? What is the assessment I need to do for the photo album, our weeks of welcome, orientation, living learning communities? And then what is the assessment I need to do that’s going to culminate or report out the learning that’s happened over the whole year? Or maybe it’s even more than the whole year. Maybe you’re going to look at trends over three years, how has learning changed over three years? The snapshot, the photo album, and then the big photo album or multiple photo albums. All right, so let’s switch gears a little bit and then we’re going to talk about assessment strategies. I want you to think very briefly when you’re sitting in class or if we’re going back to the days when we were students, if you’re not currently a student, when you’re sitting in class, what were some ways that your faculty assessed if you were learning what they wanted you to learn?
And I want you to put some of those ideas in the chat. What were some of those things that the faculty did so that they could say, “Yep, our students have gotten what I want them to get out of this lecture, this activity of this classroom.” Go. What can you put in the chat? All right. I got some iClicker questions, exams, extra exit tickets, projects, presentations, group projects. Great. What else? Anything else? Temperature check. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Any others? Muddiest point. Yes. We’re going to talk about muddiest points, Brianna, in just a couple of minutes. Papers, yes. Exams. Pop quizzes, quick practice. Go up to the board and let’s do this problem. Here’s a problem on the board. Go figure it out. Absolutely. Great. Thank you for that. There’s all sorts of assessment strategies that our faculty use in the classroom. One of the easiest ones that they use is, “Hey, here’s a quick question. I’m going to throw it out there and I want to hear what the audience is saying about that question.”
Oh yeah, people are talking about it in ways that make me understand that they know what we’re doing here. We can move on to the next topic, so there’s all sorts of ways to do that. Oftentimes we like to think about faculty classroom and classroom experiences as way different than our residence halls. And I would argue not true. Some of the same ways that our faculty are assessing learning in the classroom, we can use in our co-curricular environment, our residence halls in the same manner and still assess learning. We’re going to tweak it a little bit and I’m going to show you how to tweak it as we go through the examples. In the same way, what I want you to think about is my favorite classroom, and that’s the one you can see on the screen now. And I want to get us in the mindset that we’re thinking about this as a classroom space. I tell faculty all the time, “You know what? Your learning classroom, your learning environment, your classroom is a regular classroom space. That’s my classroom. That’s my teaching environment. That’s where I get to help students learn.”
As you’re thinking about that environment, what are some ways you can check to see what students are learning? What are some ways you might check there? Throw them in the chat. You can throw some ideas in the chat. Anything? Yeah, room checks. Do they know how to vacuum? I love that. Absolutely. One-on-one meetings, checking in with RAs. What are you seeing on the floor? What are you seeing in the community? Absolutely. You might look at your conduct stats, roommate agreements, conflict resolutions, yes, academic outreach, academic delinquent account numbers. There’s all sorts of things that you might check in to see if students are learning or if they’re behaving in a way that’s aligned with behavior expectations that you have in the community. Micro, text surveys, pulse surveys through Roompact. I love pulse surveys. Do a quick text response. One, I’m going to renew my contract. Two, I’m not. Three, I’m thinking about going elsewhere. Then you can follow up with why. What’s happening? What are you learning about?
There’s all different ways to assess learning in this environment, so let’s talk about some creative ones because oftentimes what we do is I’m going to do a quality of life survey, or I’m going to have them go to event, and then I’m going to send a survey out after the event, or I’m going to send a pre-survey about all these behavior expectations and then a post-survey. All of those things have the same words in them, surveys, surveys, surveys. And our students are tired of surveys. And I would argue data is really limited when we just do surveys, so let’s talk about what are some tools that you can have in your toolbox that’s going to help you assess learning differently. All right, so let’s start with one of my favorite one, the six word memoirs. Oh, let me go back. Six word memoirs or memoirs in general is a very easy concept to use, and particularly if you have a sequential learning with your students. For example, if you have a first year experience program that happens all year, then the six word memoirs might be really perfect.
I love to use six word memoirs with my student staff to see their growth and development over the year. Let me talk about what does this look like? Six word memoirs is literally to have students write down on a note card, or for me, I often have them do it in a book and then have them bring the book over and over again, and then turn the book in at the end of the semester. And you might say, “As a result of participating in this program tonight or this event tonight, write six words to describe what you learned tonight.” Let’s talk about the RA experience. What if at the end of every day of RA training or at the end of every RA session, write six words to describe how you’re feeling about this particular topic or what you learned about this particular topic in this moment in time. Great. At the end of every staff meeting, write one thing you’ve learned or you’ve reflected… Write six words to reflect on your experience as an RA up to this point in the semester as of tonight.
And then what if at the end of that semester you took all of those six board memoirs for your student staff member and you could look at them and look at the themes of those six word memoirs every week and you could see how those themes changed or evolved or grew over the course of the semester? And you could do that for the individual staff member, and then you could also take themes for the entire group, your particular staff, the whole department staff to see what the themes were each week of the semester with your RAs and then look overarching how do they change over time. Let me give you an example that I did. At a previous campus, we had a sophomore year experience program. Students opted into this program. And as part of this particular program, this year long program, residential life program, once a month they met for an event or activity that was going to help them learn as sophomores. One month we brought global engagement in to talk about study abroad opportunities.
One month we brought the career center and then they talked about resume development, particularly for internship opportunities. Another month we talked about declaring your major because at that campus they couldn’t declare until the end of their sophomore year, so every month was different. At the end of every monthly meeting, we said, “Write six words to describe your experience and how you’re feeling as a sophomore right now.” At the end of that semester, we had all of the sophomores come down to the lounge and we had them share in small groups what their six word memoirs are. And then we also collected that information. And here’s what happened. At the beginning of the sophomore year, when they were sharing with their small group, six word memoirs were things like, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I’m really scared because I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I don’t even know what major I want to declare.” Some of the six words were, “Why didn’t I get any special treatment when I moved in this year?” Those sorts of things.
As they moved closer to major declaration, they were like, “Oh my gosh, what do I do? I don’t know where to declare my major.” Or, “I think I want to study abroad, but how is that going to impact me?” Of course, these were all in six words or less. And then in the spring towards the end of the year, it was, “I’m confident in my major. I know what I want to do. I found an internship that’s aligned with what I’ve declared for my major.” And so what we found as we looked at this individually, students started having conversations of, “Wow, I thought I was the only one having this feeling. Now look, I’m sharing with these other sophomores and they were saying the same things I was.” As we looked at it collectively, what we found for our sophomores over years as we did this, what we found was, man, when they came in at the beginning of the fall semester, they were a mess. They were frustrated that we didn’t provide them any sort of special move in, any special programs.
We brought all of our first year students in. We did all this orientation. We did all this exciting stuff. And as sophomores, it was like, “Oh, I got to move my own stuff into the room. And wow, there wasn’t even a floor meeting. There wasn’t a welcome event. There was nothing for me.” Then it was, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to navigate this. I’ve got to declare my major and I thought I was going to be business and I’m flunking my business class. What am I going to do with my life?” And then as they moved towards the year it was, “Oh my gosh, I think I want to study abroad and I don’t know where to get started with this. Or I need to do an internship for summer and it’s January and I’m finding out internship opportunities are over.” As we got through that assessment, what we found is we were sequencing that program wrong. We needed to sequence declaration of major in September, so they were ready to declare in January.
We needed to do some study abroad in the fall semester because deadlines for spring study abroad were in November for January, so we needed to move that up. We found that most of our sophomores weren’t doing an internship this summer after their sophomore year. They wanted to do internships the summer after their junior year, so we could push that back and really focus that closer to the summer. That assessment of student learning, one, students got to share those six word memoirs with each other and they were learning and engaging and reflecting on their experience then. But then it also helped us assess our program and adjust our program to better meet the learning needs of our students. Six word memoirs, if that’s not something you’ve tried. I love it. Try it with your staff, try it with your students. And I think Brianna said, “Oh, is this my favorite book?” Yay. I love that. The next one I want to talk about is this classroom assessment technique.
If you don’t have this, go now and buy it. And it might actually be almost out of addition, so you might have to buy it used now. But this was a fantastic book that was really designed for faculty. And I can tell you that I use this book in almost all of my co-curricular assessment too. These are really great for those formative assessments that are happening in an event or in an activity. For example, you might do it at a conduct meeting. You might do it at a roommate conflict resolution. You might use it with your RA staff meeting or a program or event where you’re having a guest speaker come in. I’m going to give you some examples of these in just a minute. But what I would say is this book is one that you could hand your student staff and say, find an assessment to do with your floor meeting, or you could use it yourself. It does not require a lot of sophistication or a lot of advanced training and knowledge in order to do these.
And I’ll give you some examples here. One of my favorite is the Muddiest Point. And I think several of you said this is something that faculty use. Muddiest point can be used at the end, for example, of an RA training session. At the end of this training session on Title IX, write on this note card, “What is your muddiest point about what your role RA is in Title IX?” Then they write down this is their muddiest point. And then you can collect that and you can skim it very quickly and say, “Oh, all of the RAs said, no, I don’t have a muddiest point.” Great. They must have learned or they’ve hopefully learned what I’ve wanted them to learn, or at least they don’t have any questions in it. Or you can be like, “Wow, all of the student staff are saying, I don’t know when to call police versus when to file a report.” Great. That’s one of our learning outcomes. That means they’re not comfortable with that particular learning outcome. I need to go back and revisit it.
You can gauge very quickly where or which of your learning outcomes a student may not know. You can also, by what they say in that muddiest point, maybe gauge where they’re feeling comfortable. And then you can go in with a deeper learning assessment to see if they’ve learned it or if they’re just really ignorant, have no idea what they don’t know, so muddiest point. A couple other examples of where I like to use muddiest points. What if at the end of your conduct meeting you said, “What is the muddiest point you have about the alcohol policy?” Well, you can very quickly learn whether or not they know what the alcohol policy is so they don’t repeat the same behavior next time or whether they’re still confused or what’s the muddiest point in the conduct process. You can see if they’ve learned how to navigate that conduct process from the beginning to conclusion or whether you need to go back and reassess or re-communicate with that student so that they’re not a repeat offender and a conduct violation.
A couple of other examples. If you’re meeting with students for a roommate conflict, what if you had both of them share what their problems were, what the confusion or what their problems are, what they want to see as resolution, come to a solution and then say, “Okay, what I want you to put down is what is the muddiest point you still have on your roommate’s perspective? What do you still not understand about what their concerns are?” That would very quickly see if they’ve learned what their roommate’s concerns are and how to avoid that or how to act differently or if they’re still stuck in that. Muddiest point, a great way to assess student learning and/or confusion at least. One sentence summary. One sentence summary, again, I often do it before they leave an event or activity or in a floor meeting, I often will hand out a note card or a post-it note or sometimes if you have a GroupMe, I would just have them type it into the GroupMe or a group chat if they’re on Zoom. Write a one sentence summary of what you think was just decided in that session.
At the end of a career resume workshop that you had in your residence hall lounge, write a one sentence summary of what you’ve learned as a result of participating in this resume workshop. And then what did they write down and how does that align with the learning outcomes you started the session with? And if nobody wrote down a summary that includes one of your learning outcome, that might be a learning outcome you want to go back and revisit because you have no proof that they’re at least reflecting and stating that they feel comfortable with that. It might be that they write down something that isn’t your learning outcome at all. And then you might want to go back and say, “Hmm, does that mean that they didn’t learn what I wanted them to learn or is this in addition to what I hope that they will learn? Great. Now I know that there’s something else they’re taking away from this that I want to focus on next time.” A couple of examples.
Again, love this during RA training or at the end of a staff meeting, “Write a one sentence summary of what you think is the most important item we covered at staff meeting tonight.” At the end of a conduct meeting, “What’s the one sentence thing… What is one thing that you’re taking away from this conduct meeting?” It might be that I got in trouble and I don’t agree I should be in trouble, or it could be, “Wow, I learned I need to think about the consequences of my actions before I engage in the behavior.” Wouldn’t that be a great thing to have in a note card when a student leaves a conduct meeting so you can see over time and report back? 50% of students said, “Geez, I need to think differently about my behavior before I end up in your office next time.” Can you imagine reporting that out to our campus partners or connecting that data with conduct stats over time, recidivism rates with conduct, et cetera?
I also love to use this again with roommate conflicts, “You’ve talked through the issues, you’ve talked through what you’re going to do differently. Hey, what I want you to do now is write a one sentence summary of your roommate’s concerns and a one sentence summary of what you think you’ve both agreed to moving forward.” If you have them both write down one sentence summary of what you think that they’ve agreed to moving forward, you can very quickly see if both roommates are on the same page and are going to walk out on the same page or if they’re still in two very different places and you need to go back and revisit again, so one sentence summary can happen anywhere. What are some other ways to do this? If you’re doing a passive activity, learning activity like a bulletin board, what if they had the opportunity to respond to that bulletin board with a Post-it note that they could write on or write directly on the board? Yep, you’re taking some risks there. There might be some folks that are going to write something that’s inappropriate.
If you have them put it on a Post-it note and stick it on the board, then you can go through and take it off if it’s completely against policy, harassment, calling somebody out, inappropriate. But what I have found on my campus is when I have those one sentence summaries or a muddiest point on Post-it notes on bulletin boards, most of the time students are engaging with that and they’re doing it appropriately. GroupMe’s, “Hey, I’m going to post this particular topic or this flyer in a GroupMe and I’m going to ask you to respond to it.” Another great way to do it, all right? It doesn’t necessarily have to be just, “Hey, there’s a program in the lounge at nine o’clock. Hey, do this engagement strategy.” Think about how you might incorporate it into a one-on-one meeting, a staff meeting, an event, a makerspace event, a bulletin board, an online GroupMe or chat message, text message, et cetera. All right, last one before we move on, application cards.
Application cards is having a student before they walk out of whatever meeting session is, “Write one way you’re going to apply what you just learned tonight in another setting, in a novel setting.” I’ll very quickly give you this example. A previous campus, we had first year students serving as eco reps, serving as sustainability officers for the campus. And they were first year students. They came back early and they were then tasked with planning these events or programs for other first year students. I was charged with teaching them assessments, so I walked in and these first year students, handed them an assessment book. I said, “Plan an activity, here’s your assessment, book, pick an assessment, go.” And that’s all I did. What they did is they did a progressive ice cream Sunday event for first year students, so they had different ice cream stations. They had ice cream, they had toppings, they had whipped cream, they had a cherry, they had a spoon. And at each station along the way they talked about a different sustainable ability behavior, “Hey, you get your ice cream here.”
We’re going to talk about taking the stairs versus taking the elevator. At this next session, we’re going to talk about ice cream toppings, and we’re going to talk about using a refillable water bottle versus buying water bottles. At the next one we’re going to talk about composting. At the next one we’re going to talk about recycle stations on campus. On this one we’re going to talk about, I don’t know, turning off your lights when you leave. And then the last one they did before they got a spoon is they had to write down what is one way you can reduce your sustainability footprint in your residence hallroom tonight as a result of attending the session. They literally had about 3000 students, 4,000 students come through this session. They got all these index cards. They come back to me so excited. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, we got this assessment. What do we do with it?” And I looked at them and said, “We’ve got these note cards. You tell me. What do students learn and what do you need to do now?”
They went through all the note cards. And what they found was that students talked about taking the elevator. They talked about water bottles. They talked about turning off lights. They talked about recycling. You know what they didn’t talk about? They didn’t talk about composting at all. The students came running back to me. They’re like, “Oh my gosh, look, they talked about all these things. Look at everything they learned.” I said, “Great, but what are you going to do next?” And they’re like, “We don’t know.” And I said, “Go back to your data. Your data is telling you exactly what you need to do next.” They went back to the data and they looked up and they’re like, ” Oh my goodness, students didn’t talk about composting.” I just said, “Great. They didn’t talk about composting. That might mean they didn’t learn it, so what are you going to do next?” They got together and they said, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to take turns standing at the dining hall during peak items.”
And at that dining hall, they had compost containers before people could put their dishes up. And so they literally stood… They did a weight for a couple of days of how much composting went into the composting bins. And then after that, for the next week, they stood at the composting container at primary mealtimes and they said, “You can compost that. You can compost that. You can compost that.” And at the end of the week, they weighed again and they saw that the amount of composting materials, the weight increased exponentially. And then what they did is they worked with our environmental team and at the end of the next month, they weighed the composting in that residence hall compared to the other dining halls on campus that month. And it was higher than all the other dining halls, particularly the upper class dining halls on campus the next month and the next month and the next month. Composting was higher in that first year residence hall, dining hall every month for that entire year.
And you know what? The next year when they dispersed to other upper class communities on campus, we weighed and composting the next year after arrival and the upper class communities the following year all went up from the previous year. Do you know why? Because we taught those first year students how to compost as a result of that assessment and it carried over and changed their behavior permanently. That’s a way of doing creative assessment in the residence halls. Let me talk very quickly in the next 10 minutes about some other strategies that you might not think about. Observational snapshots. I love these. This is very, very easy. This is really you, or you could send your RAs out as learning with a checklist and say, “I’m going to just sit in some different environments in my residence hall and watch how learning occurs.” Now, you can focus this in different strategies.
On my campus, I might say, “I’m going to just sit here and observe whether or not students are engaging in some of the areas we’re tackling around personal wellbeing.” Are they drinking water? Are they getting healthy snacks out of the vending machine or unhealthy snacks? Are they talking about healthy behaviors? “I was up all night last night cramming,” versus, “I was really tired, so I called it a night and went to bed early.” It’s sitting and literally observing students, listening, watching them interact and seeing if they’re engaging a particular learning behavior that you want to see. It might be that you just want to see how they’re engaging with other people, so it might be, I’m going to just assess, are people studying alone or are they engaging in a learning center way in a community? Are they engaging in an environment, in an event or an activity, a formal learning environment?
You might, as you’re doing observational snapshots, say, “Okay, there’s informal learning happening in this particular study lounge, but in the kitchen it’s all formal learning.” In the makerspace, they’re only engaging in that space if there’s an event. They’re never ever going in there unless there’s a formal event. There’s a whole variety of ways to think about observational snapshots and learning. I’m particularly looking for a particular type of learning, and so I’m going to have a checklist to do that. I’m going to listen to what students are saying as I’m observing them, or it might be, are they engaging with a particular space in my residence hall in a way that’s conducive to learning or not conducive for learning? They’re never using this lounge. Hmm, I need to think about how to activate that space as a learning environment. Hmm, they’re only going into the makerspace if there’s a formal event or activity.
Well, geez, I want them to think about using that space for study groups or using the equipment in that spaces for their class. I need to figure out how to activate that space so they think of it as a learning environment when there’s not a formal event happening. Observational snapshots, another way to think about learning. Another way to think about assessment is to get your students involved in assessment. And one of the ways that they can do that is through engagement mapping. And that’s where you pull a group of students together and say, “I want you to think about your residence hall as a whole. I want you to think, and here’s a floor plan of our residence hall, and I’m going to give you a blue dot, a green dot, a yellow dot, and a red dot. And I want you to put blue dots on spaces where you do academics in our residence halls.”
Oh, wow. Our classroom, constantly. Our computer lab, yep. Hmm, nobody’s putting their room. I wonder why they’re not doing academics in their room. Maybe their desks are too small. Maybe the wifi isn’t good. That’s a problem, I need to think about that. Hmm, I want to see where they’re engaging with each other socially. Where are they thinking about wellbeing? Well, I’m teaching wellbeing, but they’re not ever thinking about the gym in our residence hall as a wellbeing environment. How do I activate that space differently? When we engage students in thinking about how they’re using their residence hall environment for a variety of topics, you’re helping them reflect on their experience and reflect on their learning. As they’re putting these dots around the rooms or on the floor plan, I also want you to listen and take notes about what they’re saying, because inevitably they’re going to talk to their friends about the dots they’re putting up themselves, but they’re also going to talk to their friends about the dots that their friends are putting up and how their dots compare to others.
Now that they’ve gone around the room and talked about here are the different spaces I’m activating different types of learning, then you can ask them, “Well, tell me about that. Tell me about why. Why do you think you’re not using your residence hall room to activate academics in any way, shape or form? Why is that? Why do you only use the kitchen for these types of events?” It’s going to get you a good idea of how students are engaging with your space, how they’re connecting learning to that particular space. Again, you might have them activate the space around academics, social, wellbeing, or you could take your particular learning outcomes. On my campus, our learning outcomes are beneficence, which is a Ball State specific thing. It’s lifelong learning, it’s personal wellbeing and it’s a sense of belonging, so I might say, “Tell me about the spaces in our residence hall where you feel like you have a sense of belonging. Put another dot around places in your residence hall where you feel really isolated and you don’t feel connected to other people.”
And then after they put those dots in that space, then you can ask them follow-up questions, and that is also an assessment of their learning. And then you can take all of that and see what are the themes you’ve done, and then how do you help them activate that learning more in those spaces, or how do you help them connect the dots? Or what story does that tell about students reported learning in those environments that you can map out? Reflective prompts. On our campus we are doing a lot with portfolios and reflection. We have a new online platform called… We call it Be Connected on Our Campus, where students can go in and write their own blog posts pretty much that are reflections of their learning, and then they can post those, and then they can share those links. They can put flags on them, hashtags on them around particular topics, and then they could post that, that they could share that with employers when they go to interview.
They could post that to their work supervisor, with a classroom instructor to see the learning that’s happening outside the classroom as part of their blogs or their journaling, their journal efforts. Have you thought about doing that with your RAs? “Hey, at the end of every staff meeting I’m going to give you a couple reflection prompts and here’s your journal and for the entire semester we want you to write down reflection prompts around your learning around this particular topic.” And then collect those. What if you provided a book and you handed them out and you collected them at the end of monthly floor meetings and asked students to write a quick reflection of something they’re thinking about around your learning goal? You would get a lot of data very, very quickly around particular learning reflection or at least non-directive learning assessments for your students. I love to use the online format because then they can use it in a variety of different ways.
Photo assessments, and then we’re going to wrap up here. Photo assessments, so what if you gave students a prompt around one of your learning goals? On our campus we’re really trying to help students think about their sense of belonging. What if you told them, “Hey, I want you to go around your residence hall and take pictures of where you feel like you belong or don’t belong. And then I want you to text them to me with a statement or a text or a caption about what that looks like or post it on this particular website or post it on Instagram and use this particular hashtag.” Then take all those photos and the captions and see what the themes emerge from that environment. All right, so that’s a photo assessment, another way to capture student learning or engagement, or you could go around and take pictures and then write what you’re observing around student learning.
All right. Now let’s switch gears very, very quickly in the next two or three minutes and talk about, great, I’ve got all this data. Now what do I do with it? The first thing is don’t collect so much data that you have no idea what to do. Collect some small data, use it, assess it, figure out what you learned, tweak your behavior, tweak your lesson plan, and then do it again. When you collect so much data, it’s so easy to then be like, “Ah, I don’t know where to start.” And so you collect all these note cards, you throw them in a jar or your desk drawer and you never look at them again. Figure out a small assessment, look at the data, make some changes to how you’re going to do things, and then collect it again so that you can see how it’s useful. You can see how you’re using it to make data decisions. You can tweak your performance, you can see how students are learning, and then try it again.
That gives you a win, that gives your team a win, and that gives your students a win so that they keep engaging in the activity. All right, so how do we tell the assessment story? What does this look like? Don’t just do an executive summary and send it out to everyone and hope that it’s useful. There is nothing that I found that is more unuseful than an executive summary. For years I would do a quality of life survey, and then here’s all the data, boom, executive summary. You know how many times my vice president opened that up? Zero, not a one, so instead, think about other ways and who your audience is and share data in a way that your audience is going to use quickly. For my team, they don’t like statistically significant, and so I share a lot of narrative with my coordinators because that speaks to them. I share a lot of photos with our student staff because photos and stories speak to them.
If I’m talking to faculty, I’m sharing a lot of statistically significant, I’m comparing their students to the larger student population, so communication students to all on campus students, because that speaks to their language, so report it in ways that matter to your specific audience. Do it visually. Most people are only going to have about three minutes to look at your assessment report, so what data do you want to get across in those few seconds? Can you make it colorful? How can they digest it quickly and then move forward? Word clouds, graphics, things that stand out that they can see what are the big things coming up quickly. And then finally, think about asking questions that are specific to your audience. For years, I had to do assessment reports and I would send it out to all the deans, not once did I hear anything about on campus students versus off-campus students when I sent that report to the deans. One time I decided to do our honor student population and I said, “Hey, I’m going to compare honor students who live on campus and their success to honor students who don’t live on campus.”
And I wrote that up and then I sent that to the dean. And within five minutes, I have a phone call from the dean. “This is fascinating data. Can you share more of that with me? What about this question? What about that question?” He then went to the dean’s council and said, “Oh my gosh, I got this amazing report from Residence Life and look at this information. This is so helpful.” And lo and behold, I’m getting phone calls from every dean. “Can you do this for my students? Can you do this for my students?” And I realize I’m onto something. I can highlight the story of the impact that Residence Life is having with my academic partners, but I have to ask and share the data by asking questions and answering questions that matter for that population, that matter for that students, so I put on there some of the assessment notes we’ve done. How are fee waivers supporting housing occupancy? I shared that with my business operations folks who help set our rates and they loved it. How is residential life helping students explore identity and social justice in the residence halls?
That was a few years ago before some of the executive orders went down, and that went out to my social justice and social equity and equal opportunity partners. And I had phone calls about that, “This is fascinating data. Can I take this to a conference? Can I share this with others?” Start sharing your assessment data by answering questions that matter to your audience. It’s going to be more impactful and more people are going to be talking about the good work you’re doing in Residence Life when you do it that way. All right, we’re almost out of time, so I wanted to end with assessment resources. Here’s some of my favorite assessment books, so if you are really super excited about assessment or if you’re like, “I just want to learn more about assessment,” I would really encourage you to check out some of these books. They’re good grounding, they give you good opportunities to practice your skill or to be grounded in your skill. With that, I’m going to stop sharing my screen. Great. We’re back and see if you have any questions that I can answer for you.
Anything at all? All right. Well, I’m going to do one more thing and I’m going to put on the chat my personal email address, so if you have any questions, like for me, I go back and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to try to put this into place.” And then I’m like, “Oh gosh, I’m stuck.” Or, “Oh, I wish I would’ve asked that.” If you have questions later on, please, please, please reach out to me via email and I’m happy to chat through an assessment strategy with you or help you take a look at your data and make some meaningful decisions with it or to talk with you about a best way to report that out to campus partners. With that, I’m going to thank you so much for attending today. I do want to remind you that our next webinar is on January 23rd at two o’clock Eastern Time.
And this is going to be Kate Gannon-Cullinan, and she is going to be talking about next steps from discussion to decision. And it’s really about, “Hey, I’m feeling really comfortable in my job, but I think I might be ready for that next step in my career progression. How do I know it’s time? And then what do I do after I make the decision to leave?” If you’re interested in that at all, please go ahead and register and we’ll see you again on January 23rd at two o’clock Eastern Standard Time. Thank you so much. I hope you have a great winter break and Happy New Year. Take care.
