NAU Student Affairs Assessment Resource Team

The Student Affairs Assessment Resource Team is a collaboration among the eleven units within the Division of Student Affairs. The full team of representatives of every unit meets monthly in order to establish, coordinate, review, and prioritize assessment activities across the division. Committees meet also monthly, and presentations of project results are given monthly both in SAART meetings and in the Student Affairs directors’ meetings.

While SAART has taken many forms during the last ten years, in the past two years, units have documented existing assessment activities, acted as consultants to one another, shared results, and identified future projects. A primary goal of all assessment has been established. This goal is to disseminate and actively employ assessment results, rather than have them sit in unopened file folder, desk drawers, or in notebooks.

Among other effects, SAART’s aggregate review of assessment activities along with the review of broad areas of assessment has led to the creation of a Student Affairs datamart. The datamart stores data on student participation in Student Affairs services, programs, and activities. With these data, identification of varied students groups is possible and used to better understand involvement, persistence, and retention at the university. Additionally, with the datamart data, SA units are able to analyze who utilizes their services and thus better serve students.

Projects for the coming year include the production of new and the revision existing datamart reports, the creation and refinement of unit assessment plans, the articulation of those plans with divisional and institutional strategic plans, and administration and consultation on discrete unit assessment projects such as satisfaction surveys, benchmarking studies, and cohort retention tracking.