Academic PIEs

William & Mary has instituted a Process of Institutional Effectiveness (PIE) that emphasizes curricular experiences and measures the extent to which learning expectations are met though a defined curriculum.  PIE also refers to profiles used to document the process and demonstrate how assessment results guide curricular and pedagogical changes to enhance student learning.  We have recently completed a major redesign of the database and web application used to manage the PIEs.   As all academic programs engage in institutional effectiveness, PIEs for the programs in Arts & Sciences, Education, Law, and Marine Science are managed in the database.  The School of Business has a more complex PIE/course portfolio database and is not included in the university’s PIE database. 

Continued modifications to the PIE database are needed in order to preserve the important and significant differences between assessment of student learning outcomes in our undergraduate programs and in our graduate and professional programs, as well as differences among academic disciplines.  We embrace the varied approaches of faculties as they engage in institutional effectiveness, even as we strive to build a consistent format for reporting institutional effectiveness. Key to each approach is a reflective, collaborative, and deliberate review of student learning outcomes and the use of assessment results to inform decisions about the curriculum and pedagogy.  The goal is a manageable and meaningful process that avoids reductionism and a database that provides a means for documenting and reviewing the varied approaches. 

An Academic program PIE includes the following components (departmental comments are options throughout the PIE):

• Purpose: links each department to the institutional mission
• Expectation:  what faculty expect students to learn in the major/program. The profile is organized by expectation. Each expectation includes the following, some of which may be consistent across expectations:
• Experiences: Description of how the learning expectation is addressed in the curriculum and/or co-curriculum; how students will learn what faculty expect them to learn
• Description of Student Work:  identifies specific types of assignments, methods, tests, etc. that individual faculty members use to evaluate student learning and is a reference for the program about data sources for assessment at the program level
• Strategies for evaluating student work:
• who conducts evaluations (e.g., department curriculum committee)
• process used to evaluate student experiences: description of how the program reviews curricular and co-curricular experiences
• sampling strategy to illustrate representativeness of student work relative to learning experiences and range of performance (e.g., low level and high level)
• other materials reviewed (if relevant)
• cycle for evaluating expectation (for internal use to identify when to archive)

• Description of how the department/program uses findings and recommendations of curriculum/evaluation committee to address strengths/weaknesses in curriculum:  the process whereby the department or program  make decisions to improve and enhance learning experiences
• Use of Assessment Results to Enhance Student Learning: what changes have been made to enhance student learning. The faculty draws on data from assessment of student learning and other sources such as program reviews and alumni surveys to plan how to improve and enhance student learning experiences. This provides a more comprehensive approach to continual improvement and avoids the reductionism that would narrowly define institutional effectiveness without consideration of a more robust compilation of evidence. 
• Support files: optional, and is used by some faculties as a repository for information about the PIE.