Initiative 1 Culture of Evidence
Systemically Strengthening the Culture of Evidence
No one person can do it alone. To be an effective college that uses data in our day-to-day activities, Everett Community College needs to include a broad swath of the campus community. The goal of this project is to give faculty & staff the framework to turn their ideas into action and then turn the action back into ideas. We will use the ATD framework at the level of the individual to improve the campus and provide professional development for college employees. This will be a 5 step process:
1) Disseminate data to staff through data summits, regular emails with data in them, and other methods.
This will help staff & faculty get ideas about problems & solutions and also help make data part of our campus culture.
2) Provide funding through micro-grants to individuals or groups for strategies or interventions that promote student success. The application for funding will be designed to help frame their intervention as a research project, and will also ask them about a follow-up plan.
This will help staff & faculty identify the degree to which the intervention improves student success.
3) Support/require evaluation of interventions. The IR department will provide support in designing and pulling data for the evaluation plan. Some portion of the funding will be dependent on an evaluation plan.
This will help staff & faculty turn their action into a serious intervention where the college can see the results.
4) Make a conscious choice about scale-up. The Priority Group for this intervention will be responsible for looking at each evaluation and deciding whether a particular intervention should be passed on to another group or administrator for follow up, and, if so, who it should be passed to.
This will help turn effective interventions into long-lasting, positive change at the college.
5) Building a repository of research. Each intervention will be put in a standardized format as a research report and disseminated to the campus on an intranet site and/or email.
This will help staff & faculty turn their work into finished research reports which they can take pride in and take to conferences. It will also create institutional memory and data which will fuel new ideas.