Assessment

Two weeks ago, Ann went to the national CRLA (College Reading and Learning Association) conference to learn about how we can justify our purpose and then be able to adequately assess our impact at Sam Houston.

In the past year, Ann has been working to prove -- in numbers -- that we are a well-utilized student service at Sam. We've made alliances with faculty members and begun a sort of campaign for getting more students in the door. We started doing more orientations, offered presentations for classes with specific needs, advertised with the Student Services weekly email, and changed the way we approached freshmen orientation, just to name a few things. We tracked the numbers from the year before and the present one and guess what? We discovered we had more students come through our doors. Both semesters in the 2008-2009 academic year saw a record number of students at The Writing Center, and it seems as if we may break that record again.

All this is great news. We have people coming in our doors.

But, let's say we're a restaurant. The purpose of a restaurant in our capitalist country is to make money, which supports our purpose of being a business. We can be the most popular restaurant in town, sell out of burgers every night and always have a wait list, but if we don't charge enough for our famous avocado-salsa-and-barbecue sauce burgers, we're not running our restaurant effectively and we're going to go bankrupt. The same concept applies to the Writing Center, but with writers instead of dollars. We can have folks come in our doors all day long, but if we're not effectively tutoring whatever points need to be made in a session, we're not fulfilling our purpose, and we're going bankrupt, but in writers. If you ran a Writing Center, would you rather go bankrupt with the bank or a university? The former is an economic issue that could possibly be corrected when the economy corrects itself, the latter is a credibility issue that may never be able to be corrected. Starting a business is a one-shot gamble and this is our one shot.

Ann came back with all sorts of ideas to measure our effectiveness as a Writing Center and she plans to begin the process of assessment as soon as possible. Most of us tutors won't see the assessments until next semester, but the wheels are turning. It'll be an interesting process. I personally make the hypothesis that we are going to find we have been effective in unexpected ways in addition to finding our places of needed growth. Also, if we don't find anything that we can expand upon or refine, we aren't looking hard enough. There's always room for growth. But, we will find something. We have a sharp pair of directors and a staff that's just as tough on ourselves. We are sure to find something.