ABSTRACT
Imagine a several year study of an institution and the programs within it that involves a large number of committees articulating goals, making a plan, executing parts of the plan, and writing a report that is shared with an accreditation peer review team. After the team leaves, the committees are disbanded and the report is filed away without further thought or consideration as to how it might be used to improve student learning. A significant amount of time and energy was extended for the study and report, but quickly it is all forgotten. Unfortunately this scenario is all too common on many college campuses, as most simply use assessment information to fulfill accreditation requirements (Kuh & Ikenberry, 2009). Be it for an accreditation study or for another reason, information about educational quality is often not reported broadly to different audiences, whether internal or external to the institution. This break down of communication with varied audiences is unfortunate because it does not foster using assessment information for institutional improvement in so much as it simply reports the activities to a small internal group. Instead, documents and reports, whether created for accreditation or for another reason, could be used to tell a story about the institutional efforts to explore student learning, inform subsequent iterations of assessment, and lead to the improvement of student learning. While we do not advocate that all accreditation information should be made public, we do believe that information from this activity as well as other activities involving assessment should be communicated more broadly than is currently the case. Dissemination and availability of assessment results that are tailored to specific audiences may help with the utility of the results.
