15. Are there required formats for reporting data?

15. Are there required formats for reporting data?

Yes and no. You should receive WP003, ACT, MFAT, CCTT (contingent on General Education assessment plan) and other data from Institutional Research in an MS Word table with a structure something like this: 
  
  
Average XXX Test Scores of Graduating Seniors, 1993-1997

This format shows the number of your graduates that have been assessed with the instrument and permits you to compare departmental programs, compare your department with the college, and compare your department and college with the University. If a test has subscores, separate tables for each subscore might be provided.
You may use a reporting format for departmentally collected data designed specifically for your assessment measure. If the measure is unique to the department, rows for college and university will not be necessary. Regardless of format, data on graduating seniors should be reported so as to support comparison across calendar years. For example, lists of students placed in jobs or in graduate schools within a year of graduation are useful in conveying the range and type of employment or post-graduate studies the majors are going into, but they do not give the reader information about placement rates and the success of the department in collecting information about placement rates. A table that does give such information might look something like this: 
  
  
Job Placement* Rates, 1993-1997

*"Placed" includes students placed in a job or continuing in a job related to the major. 
 
Suppose a department needs to report the results of assessment of senior capstone projects. One approach is to report to the number of graduates, number of graduates assessed, and number of graduates who passed. But if all graduating seniors must pass the senior capstone project, this would not be an especially informative table. More informative would be a table or set of tables that report results in terms of percentage of students achieving defined performance levels in specific criterial areas, as follows:
Senior Capstone Project

This style could be varied to report the result of internship and practica evaluations as follows:
Internship Evaluations

Numerous styles of table are possible depending on the nature of the data to be reported. Remember that data should be collected so as to supply credible information about student achievement and to identify relative strengths and weaknesses. Tabular summaries of data should also support longitudinal comparison of departmental graduates and show how close the department is to assessing all of its graduates with that particular measure. Though there may be instances where tabular reporting is not appropriate, most data, including qualitative data, can be reported in tables if they are being analyzed within an explicit conceptual framework. Tables help the reader take in the results of assessment at a glance. However, tables should never be inserted into your report without comment. Analysis and interpretation are essential components of assessment, and the reader will want to know what you make of the data in the tables.