Assessing for Alignment: How to Win Collaborators and Influence Stakeholders

by Stephanie Mikitish, Vanessa Kitzie, and Lynn Silipigni Connaway

Published in the book Shaping the Campus Conversation on Student Learning and Experience: Activating the Results of Assessment in Action, this chapter reports on findings from an action-oriented research agenda project that examined how academic libraries can contribute to student learning and success and demonstrate these contributions. The three data sources that informed findings from the report included a substantive review of literature published from 2010 to 2016 on this topic, including all projects from the ACRL program Assessment in Action: Academic Libraries and Student Success (AiA); focus group interviews with academic library administrators from diverse colleges and universities; and semi-structured, individual interviews with provosts from these same institutions.

This chapter identifies how researchers and professionals can leverage the AiA approach to advance three key priority areas: communication, collaboration, and institutional mission and alignment. The chapter summarizes these priority areas, discusses the major differences between AiA and non-AiA projects, and suggests ways the AiA approach can contribute to effective practices and investigate selected research questions from the report. The team has based these recommendations on analysis of provost interviews. These interviews provide researchers and professionals with the needed perspective of higher education administration, which often is missing in current work.

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Reprinted with permission of ACRL. CC BY 4.0.

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