My Worst Assessment - A Work in Progress...

Kyra DeLoach

College Dorm Room image from WIX

When I started working in housing and student life at Indiana University South Bend in 2017, my director said something that has stuck with me ever since: “Student life comes with student problems.” Students have different needs and ‘problems’ that as a housing professional I have had to adapt to and address each semester.

That being said, each semester is different and brings new challenges. As a Residence Hall Manager, that means I have to train my student staff, Resident Assistants, to adapt to these needs and situations as they come. It can be difficult to prepare them for what they need to know, which is why we help along the way, but one way we try to prepare RAs for the semester is by doing a ‘Health and Safety Checks Activity.’ This activity has been done each year during Fall training way before I started at my institution three years ago.

Each month, the RAs administer health and safety checks where they take a form with different categories for each room of the apartment space and they check suites for cleanliness and safety. I can’t prepare them for every room they will encounter or every item they may find, but we try to prepare them with this activity. While we do this activity, I don’t think it really prepares them and it is hard to assess them and if they have learned anything. The information that we do gain from assessment, we don’t do anything with it.

The activity serves as sort of a pre-assessment; we are trying to gauge what they know and see how they will do a month later when they are on their own. We place prohibited items in an empty room; candles, empty alcohol bottles, etc. and send in RAs in pairs to fill out the forms. Professional staff will sit in the room and watch and listen to the RAs. We watch for what they notice, what they do with the prohibited items, etc. After they finish filling out the form, we answer questions and give some feedback; but they won’t remember that a month later when they do it for the first time.

Referencing Bloom's Taxonomy, a framework of educational objectives, this activity does not hit all the marks. Looking at the categories: Create, Evaluate, Analyze, Apply, Understand and Remember, I would say my main goal of this activity is to get them to understand and remember when they do it a month later. It does not fit most of these educational objectives, but those two specifically.

I don’t think this activity is effective in general, but especially in terms of assessment. We don’t give feedback, we don’t use any technology, we don’t even document anything. I have brought up multiple times about how this doesn’t seem like adequate training, and it is not accessible. At this point, RAs just learn as they go and I don’t feel like it supports them, it doesn’t benefit our students who are going through the process, and it doesn’t benefit us as professional staff who organize training each Fall. 

As a department, we have been working on ways to enhance this training to make it more valuable for our learners, our students, and our department. We have not found an activity that checks all three of those boxes yet, but I believe we are getting closer.

References

Bloom's Taxonomy.net. (n.d.). What is Bloom's Taxonomy?. Bloom's Taxonomy. https://bloomstaxonomy.net