Planning and Assessment in Higher Education

by Michael F. Middaugh

"Planning and Assessment in Higher Education "provides guidance for assessing and promoting institutional effectiveness. The book contains a wide range of issues, from measures of effectiveness to communicating with the public. Written by an expert in the field, with titles such as the Assistant VP for Institutional Research and Planning, director of national costs of instruction research project, as well as the Vice Chair of an accreditation agency, this is an essential resource for university leaders for achieving institutional effectiveness.

Genres: Research, Reference, Education

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2009

Reviews

[MJ James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Planning and Assessment in Higher Education: Demonstrating Institutional Effectiveness is an applied manual on implementing assessment in higher education. It approaches assessment from a practical standpoint including the impact of assessment on multiple aspects and from multiple perspectives in higher education.

The chapters on assessing student life are well thought out and extremely practical. They contain a wealth of information that would be useful for universities that are in various stages of assessment gathering. The chapters on course assessment is less applied. However, Middaugh does include a vast amount of resources to expand your knowledge in course assessment.

One of the strengths of the book is that includes practical information about accreditation, although most specific examples are focused on the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. There is also a huge slant towards using Institutional Research data for assessment purposes. This is great if your university is not utilizing this data, but not as helpful if that is all that your university utilizes.

I would not consider Planning and Assessment in Higher Education to be the only resource that a university needs. Nor does it ever try to be. It is a useful guide that provides a wealth of other resources to pursue depending on the specific need of your university. It is also extremely well written and easy to read. The way Middaugh explained some items, items that I had previously worked on, gave me a fresh understanding of the usefulness and potential.

[Molly Durava · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was helpful for some of my assessment work, but really focused more on Institutional Effectiveness, which was also interesting.

[Ciji Ann Heiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provided a comprehensive overview of measuring institutional effectiveness looking at faculty measures, student learning measures, and administrative measures. The author cites multiple studies that provide broad overarching measures and provides references for materials that offer more detailed direct measures of efficiency and student learning.

[Gaetan T. Giannini]

Considering the subject, not bad so far.