Working Paper: Outcomes Assessment" or "Can't We Just Get All the Data Required for Complying With Regulations and Mandates to Match?

Brad C. Phillips
Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District
In the last several years, California Community Colleges have experienced a tremendous increase in the number of new mandates and regulations demanding outcomes assessment data. Calls for outcomes information have also been made on a national level. In 1987, the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC), a panel of community college presidents and researchers, developed three reasons for outcomes assessment (Palmer, 1990).

  1. Accountability -- reporting information to external constituencies such as parents, legislators, alumni, employers, and the general public.
  2. Planning -- providing an information base for management decision making.
  3. Improvement -- using information as the basis for faculty development, curriculum change, and the development of student support services.
Data obtained for the above purposes revolves around student attributes, academic progress and the outcome of their educational experience at the end of the students' experience with the college (Palmer, 1990).

On a slightly different note, Banta (1988) describes outcomes assessment as seeking to collect the following information:

	(1) student performance on specified measures of development; (2) program
 strengths and weaknesses; and (3) institutional effectiveness.  By looking at what 
 students and graduates know and are able to do with their knowledge, as well as
 their perceptions of the quality of institutional programs and services, researchers 
 can obtain important information about programs' ability to meet stated objectives
 for student development.  The collective quality of its programs establishes the
 effectiveness of the institution (pp.1-2).

Although there are slight differences in the way outcomes assessment has been conceptualized, information requirements about higher education and its impact have increased.

Mandates and regulations that drive outcomes assessment data often have overlapping information requirements, causing disjointed research efforts. These efforts are, at times, occurring simultaneously among different departments. Furthermore, research requested through legislation is not overly prescriptive, leading college officials and the institutional researchers to figure out what is needed to meet a request.

This paper presentation focused on presenting a model for categorizing student outcomes with the numerous mandates faced by the community colleges. An extensive grid was presented along with strategies for gathering the necessary data to meet the mandated information requirements. The grid also displayed the areas where the mandates overlap.