2025 Assessment Grants: Call for Proposals
Deadline for grant proposal submission: March 3, 2025. Funding decisions will be announced on or before April 30, 2025.
The Office of Assessment is pleased to announce a grant competition in support of new and ongoing assessment efforts related to academic excellence and student success. Plans call for supporting as many as 5 grants. Each grant will be funded at an amount up to $5,000. Individual stipends are limited to $2,500. Budget requests must fit the nature and scope of the project. Applications will be submitted online here.
GRANT PURPOSE
Conducting assessments and then using assessment findings are essential steps for maintaining high quality programs that are consistent with the University's mission. Assessment findings help the institution identify areas for strategic change or improvement, help the institution determine how best to support needed changes, and also help the institution highlight program and University strengths. Assessment also enables us to evaluate the competence of graduates in terms of program goals, those of the core curriculum, and the University mission.
Ultimately, assessments are not an end in themselves but a means to other ends – specifically, for continually improving our work on promoting student learning and development. The fundamental purpose of the KU assessment grants program, then, is to support efforts to understand and then improve students’ achievements in important learning outcomes.
For 2024, there will be five tracks for grant proposals:
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(1) Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes for Academic Programs
For this track, the focus is assessment of learning outcomes or goals for a course or program. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Develop and implement a new assessment of one learning goal from one of your courses or your program
- Develop and test a new measure and/or method of assessing one or more learning goals
- Assess the impact of a specific educational experience or practice on one or more learning goals
- Utilize existing data/evidence to examine the impact of a program, course, or specific educational experience within a course on one or more learning goals; possibilities include placement testing, student research experiences, internships, and honors courses.
- Adapt a current assessment method to focus on conducting assessment in ways that attend to issues of equity. Some assessment methods can more effectively promote academic achievement for students from diverse backgrounds.
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(2) Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes for General Education
The purpose of this track is to conduct assessments related to the learning goals of General Education at Kutztown University. Possible projects include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Develop and implement a new assessment of a General Education learning outcome from one of your General Education courses
- Develop and test a new measure and/or method of assessing one or more General Education learning goals
- Assess the impact of a specific educational experience or practice on one or more General Education learning goals
- Utilize existing data/evidence to examine the impact of a program, course, or specific educational experience within a course on one or more General Education learning goals.
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(3) Curricular – Co-curricular Collaborative Projects
This track is designed to support the assessment of projects where faculty utilize a KU co-curricular experience or program to support a specific learning goal in a specific course. These projects will depend on a partnership between faculty and staff involved in co-curricular experiences; the faculty member must be the Principal Investigator, although a staff member may be a co-PI. Possible projects include but are not limited to the following:
- Assess the impact of a specific educational experience or practice on a course, program or General Education learning outcome that includes the use of a co-curricular program or experience for the purposes of a course
- In a partnership between an academic course or program and a co-curricular program, utilize existing data/evidence that assesses the impact of a specific educational experience or practice on a course, program or General Education learning outcome.
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(4) Assessments related to Retention and Persistence
This track is designed to support assessments that speak to specific problems related to retention and persistence that a program, department, or college is facing. For this grant track, the proposer must provide evidence of a problem (e.g., the rate for the program, department or college) and that improvement is needed. Possible projects include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Analyze existing data/evidence to better understand the problem and help identify possible means for reducing the problem, either for the program/department/college as a whole or for specific subgroups
- Analyze existing data/evidence to examine the performance of specific programs, services or other efforts that are attempting to increase the retention/persistence rate
- Develop and implement a new assessment of a current program, service or experience that is attempting to increase the retention/persistence rate
- Develop, implement and assess the impact of a new experience that is attempting to increase the retention/persistence rate.
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(5) Assessments related to Other Student Success Indicators
This track is designed to support assessments that speak to other specific issues related to student success indicators that a program, department, or college is facing. These other student success indicators include graduation rates, achievement gaps for Pell recipients and under-represented minority students, and STEM degrees granted. For this grant track, the proposer must provide evidence of a problem (e.g., the rate for the program, department or college) and that improvement is needed. Possible projects include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Analyze existing data/evidence to identify possible means for reducing the problem for the particular success indicator, either for the program/department/college as a whole or for specific subgroups
- Analyze existing data/evidence to examine the performance of specific programs, services or other efforts that are attempting to reduce the problem related to the specific student success indicator
- Develop and implement a new assessment of an existing program, service or experience that seeks to address the problem
- Develop, implement and assess the impact of a new experience that is attempting to address the problem.
For all five tracks of the Assessment Grant program, the goals are to:
- generate assessment evidence that can be applied to improving students’ achievements of important learning goals
- generate models of assessment practices that can be used to inform other assessment efforts
- produce direct evidence of student achievement of learning outcomes
- serve as “seed money” to support promising pilot projects or the research necessary to prepare externally competitive funding proposals
- encourage teaching faculty to engage in sound practices in assessing student learning outcomes (in the case of the tracks for assessing learning outcomes); funding can be used to support new initiatives and to strengthen ongoing assessment activities.
Grant proposals may be submitted by individual teaching faculty, two or more individuals from a single academic instructional program, two or more individuals from two or more academic instructional programs or in the case of the curricular – co-curricular projects, one or more faculty and one or more staff.
Submission Guidelines & Obligations
The Office of Assessment reserves the right to provide full funding for the proposal, to provide partial funding, to request that the applicant offer further elaboration or clarification on specific points, to suggest alternate sources of funding, or to reject the proposal.