City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME II
and assist with information literacy skills,” but also seeks to help students “apply study and life management
skills toward the realization of academic, vocational and personal goals” and “communicate
assertively with members of our diverse communities.” Clearly, the initial efforts of the Student
Development Division to define skills and competencies have produced a wealth of goals that range
from clearly defined cognitive skills to ambitious efforts to transform students’ views of themselves
and their place in society.
Measuring the outcomes: Assessing effectiveness. While the instructional programs are grounded in testing
and assessment (at least as they relate to individual student achievement), student services have not
traditionally been in the business of formal outcomes assessment. This is not to say that there are not
traditional measures of student success related to student development. Transfer rates usually have a direct
correlation with the extent to which the College provides effective counseling and other support services
to students with four-year transfer aspirations. Specific retention strategies, such as early alert programs
and “wrap-around” counseling and support services for targeted student populations, can be credited with
specific improvements in student outcomes. However, measuring a department’s success in developing
students’ “confidence in their academic abilities” or their “ability to advocate for themselves” presents significant
challenges. In fact, even the assessment of more traditional learning skills like “extrapolating prior
knowledge to new situations” (CSCD) and students’ ability to conduct “informational interviews that will
assist them in clarifying interests and goals” (New Student Counseling) can be difficult given the way
student support services are delivered to and used by students. While a counselor may engage a student in
an “informational interview” or the application of a previous experience to a new problem, the counselor
does not give a test that establishes the individual student’s mastery of these skills nor does the counselor
accumulate longitudinal data on many students repeating this process as evidence of the efficacy of the
counseling office.
The responses of the 12 service areas to the initial SLO inventory suggests that our Student Development
Division is well aware of these challenges and is committed to developing useful assessment tools. The
assessment tools identified thus far fall into three categories: information provided directly by students,
e.g., surveys, anecdotal evidence, etc.; indirect measures of effectiveness; and direct measures of outcomes.
CSCD provides a constructive framework for the use of surveys: “Ask students directly what counselors
did for them—how they were affected and how counseling services supported and enhanced student
learning.” Thus, if a counseling department wants to assess whether their services have contributed to
students’ “confidence in their academic abilities,” surveys may provide useful data and point toward
improved outcomes. Similarly, DSPS might survey students and faculty to assess whether their students
are demonstrating “the ability to advocate for themselves.”
Survey information relies upon students accurately reporting the impact of a particular service on an outcome.
Indirect measures attempt to use student behaviors (and the statistical analysis of those behaviors)
and other related outcomes as a reflection of student learning. For example, Admissions and Records
(A&R) establishes the students’ “ability to read, comprehend and interpret … the content of the College
Catalog” as a major learning outcome. The indirect measure of this outcome might be “a decrease in the
number of students being denied graduation due to incomplete coursework as a result of not reading and
comprehending the CCSF graduation requirements and utilizing the [soon-to-be-operational] Degree Audit
[program].” Similarly, DSPS wants its student clients “to anticipate needs and make requests for accommodation
in a timely manner” and proposes using the DSPS office’s records on documented requests as a tool
for assessing improvements in students’ timeliness and evidence that students are improving their ability
to “advocate for themselves” and “fully participate in the college community,” two of the DSPS program’s
most significant SLOs.
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