Grant Summary
$25,000 over 12 months. Building on past cooperative efforts to create diverse communities and multicultural programming, Goucher, McDaniel, and Washington Colleges will design a quantitative and qualitative tool that assesses the efficacy of multicultural efforts. The campuses each articulate this goal, in some form, in their mission statement, strategic plan, or general education requirement. Led by a facilitator, faculty members, assessment officers, student life administrators and students will meet to learn more about the assessment of multicultural endeavors and discuss how to measure effectiveness in this area. Based on the information gained through these two efforts, they will create an assessment process involving a formative and summative portfolio informed by qualitative and quantitative responses; a longitudinal study that examines student outcomes over time; and the addition of specific questions to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)—which all three institutions use—to gain some common data. Each campus will also conduct activities appropriate for their communities, for example, study circles, workshops, brown-bag lunches, and lecture-discussions. Through this work, the collaborative hopes to shed new light on the design and implementation of assessment strategies for multiculturalism at the partner colleges and at liberal arts colleges more generally.