What Do You Want to Assess?
Now that you understand two different ways to focus an interfaith assessment, you can determine your assessment purpose by answering the three following questions. Answers to these questions build on each other and keep your interfaith assessment specific:
- What is motivating your interest in interfaith assessment at this time?
- What do you want to learn from your interfaith assessment?
- How do you think you could use your assessment results?
You will use the answers to these questions to generate an interfaith assessment purpose statement. And with that, you’ll have a solid foundation for a focused, effective interfaith assessment.
1. What is motivating your interest in interfaith assessment at this time?
It is always useful to first understand what is driving your interest in doing an interfaith assessment. This informs what you hope to learn from an assessment and how your assessment results can be used. Particular situational or institutional realities may elevate the priority to understand students’ learning and development or the campus climate. (Download a printable worksheet of this resource.)
See the following lists of common situations that drive interfaith assessment. While not exhaustive, these lists should help you identify where you would like to focus your interfaith assessment.
My program wants to assess students’ learning and development because of:
- Interest in understanding whether changes or improvements to existing interfaith programming are needed
- Uncertainty about what students are learning from interfaith efforts
- Need for reporting the overall effectiveness of a program at its conclusion
- Divisional or institutional assessment/accountability requirements
My campus wants to assess our climate for worldview diversity because of:
- Concerns raised about the campus climate for certain religious or nonreligious groups
- Incidents on or off campus that affect the campus climate
- Shifting student, faculty, or staff religious and nonreligious demographics
- Changes in institutional policy
Question 1: What situation is motivating your interest in (or need to do) interfaith assessment at this time?
2. What do you want to learn from your interfaith assessment?
Depending on what is motivating your interest in or need to do interfaith assessment, it is useful to think of assessment in terms of learning something specific about your students or the campus climate.
Students’ learning and development
- What did students learn because of an interfaith program?
- After participating in an interfaith program, do students achieve the program’s learning outcomes?
- Should we consider changes or improvements to our program?
- Does students’ learning differ across groups of students (e.g., across worldviews, particular identities, academic standing, majors)?
Campus climate for religious diversity
- To what extent do students of diverse worldviews perceive positive (accepting, supportive) and negative (divisive, discriminatory) aspects of their campus climates?
- Do students perceive that their campus provides meaningful opportunities to engage across worldview diversity?
- How do students perceive their interactions on campus across worldview difference?
- Do students’ perceptions of their campus climates differ across particular student groups? In what ways?
Question 2: Based on what is motivating your interest in interfaith assessment at this time, what do you need or hope to learn from your assessment?
3. How do you think you could use your assessment results?
Finally, thinking about how assessment results can be used—including with whom you might share your assessment results—is important to consider in the early stages of planning your interfaith assessment. Answers to the two preceding questions will help you develop a strategy for sharing your results in ways that are action-oriented. Based on what is motivating your assessment (Question #1) and what you want to learn from your assessment (Question #2), there are likely various audiences who could benefit from your assessment findings. Remember that faculty, staff, students, and off-campus partners can all benefit from learning about your interfaith assessment findings. Given this, key questions to answer in developing a strategy to share your results include:
Question 3a: Who are the individuals/areas that are affected by/could most benefit from your assessment findings?
Question 3b: What decisions could be made with your assessment findings?