Designing Comprehensive Assessment Plans: The Big Picture Leads to the Little Picture

Abstract

Having an overall plan for assessment brings measurement and meaning together--and keeps you from being overwhelmed. This paper reviews five top, bottom, middle, and sideways approaches to assessment planning: modeling an academic department, serving a strategic plan, evaluating departments, weaving existing data, and being selective (scorecards and dashboards). It is one thing to know how to assess this or that--another to make all assessment serve the library’s general mission.