Why Assessment?

For more than two years, as part of the Developing Character in College Communities research project,^[1] we’ve convened staff from a total of 24 centers for Christian thought^[2] for online and in-person gatherings focused on learning and implementing best practices in the formation of student character. In those meetings, staff at these centers often expressed a desire for more tools and training in assessing and evaluating their activities and programs. What participants recognized was that good assessment is a great aid to designing effective programs. In the same way that quick and regular feedback is a necessary part of acquiring and improving any skill—which is why feedback from an instructor or coach is so helpful in learning a sport or a musical instrument—so too is quick and regular feedback about what’s happening among your program participants a vital part of making progress toward your center’s goals. To operate without such feedback is to make (at best) intuitive guesses without clear data for what your programs and activities are accomplishing. For this reason, we’ve developed this toolkit to provide basic tools to collect data for making informed decisions rather than intuitive guesses.

Not only are the results of such assessments helpful in improving character-forming programs, but the process of assessment itself can catalyze character formation. One refrain that we heard from many student participants in our two-year study was how helpful it was for them to engage in these assessments, which encouraged them to reflect on their own character development. Because much assessment involves student self-reflection (a key process in our theory of change for student character development ), it can spur further character growth, and you may want to use assessment for this purpose only. (Indeed, one of our methods for implementing this toolkit is intended primarily to serve the personal growth of student participants.)

The Scope of This Toolkit

This assessment toolkit puts into your hands resources that you can easily implement to gain real-time feedback about what’s happening with students’ character development. As the name implies, it is a set of assessment “tools” (surveys, worksheets, interview protocols, interpretative guides, etc.) that can be used by staff at any center for Christian thought to better understand how their student participants are changing in their character. These tools are informed by contemporary interdisciplinary (social scientific, theoretical, and theological) character research, by numerous hours of discussion with practitioners at centers for Christian thought, and by a two-year longitudinal research study of character formation among students at centers for Christian thought.

At the outset, it is important to be clear about the specific purposes (and thus limitations) of this toolkit. It is designed to help advance your center’s goals related specifically to student character formation. We know that character formation may be just one of your center’s goals, and students may be just one group among others that your center serves. However, as we’ll explain in chapter two , we think that student character formation is a central purpose for higher education, and thus integral to the work of any Christian center seeking to serve, supplement, and augment the educational and spiritual growth of college students. Indeed, we’ve found in our research that most centers for Christian thought are already deeply engaged in the work of student character formation. The limitation that comes with this specific aim is that it will not help you (at least directly) in assessing other goals for your center––say, institutional academic transformation––or your goals with non-student participants.

The second point is that this toolkit is aimed at using assessment to further character formation. It is not a comprehensive guide to character formation best practices. Neither is it meant to help conduct virtue assessments independent from your center’s aims and goals, like a third-party evaluation might.^[3] Rather, it’s meant to provide centers with a set of assessment tools that can immediately be implemented toward the end of helping students grow in character. Any data gained through these assessments is intended to guide you toward better programs and practices in your centers. For that reason, knowing how to interpret and how to use the data you receive from the assessment is as important as knowing how to conduct the assessment––which is why we’ll cover those aspects in this toolkit as well. Furthermore, as stated above, the assessment processes themselves are meant to contribute toward character formation among participants.

Defining Terms: What are “Character” and “Virtue”?

Defining terms like character and virtues can be challenging because they have millennia-long histories and specific connotations in different contexts. They can be loaded terms that people use to shame others or to promote self-focused improvement outside relationships with other people and God; that is NOT how we think about or use these terms. Instead, when we talk about virtues, we are describing what Scripture calls “the fruit of the Spirit” – the qualities of character that will grow as we engage in loving, authentic relationships with God and a community of believers. Virtues represent habits, often cultivated through spiritual disciplines and practices as well as relationships, that promote individual and communal flourishing. As habits, virtues become part of who a person is and show up across different contexts (e.g., home, school, church, athletic field) and relationships (e.g., family, friends, acquaintances, enemies). Importantly, virtues are not just rote behaviors or actions; instead, the motivations people have for behavior that looks virtuous matter. To be virtuous, habits must be connected to a transcendent narrative identity– to a story about the world and how we fit into it that is bigger than ourselves. As Christians, then, our virtues entail the habits of our lives that reflect the image of God as we respond to God’s grace and love, participating in the Kingdom now and in the world to come.

Throughout this toolkit, we use “character” and “virtue” in related but slightly distinct ways. We use “virtues” when describing specific characteristic adaptations or excellences that a person exhibits (e.g., patience, humility, courage, etc.). We use “character” to refer to the overall constellation of virtues that make a person who they are, morally speaking. “Virtue,” in the collective singular, we take to be a synonym with how we’re using “character,” but we generally try to use “character” when speaking about the whole shape of a person’s moral life to make clearer this distinction between the whole and particular virtues.

Key Virtues Covered in This Toolkit

In this toolkit, we provide means to assess the 16 particular virtues that we investigated in college students through our two-year longitudinal study (Table 1.1). We chose these specific virtues based on a variety of factors. We sought out virtues that had a strong scientific evidence base, including valid measurement instruments, to ensure our integrity in the research process. More importantly, we thought carefully about the virtues salient in diverse centers for Christian thought, asking leaders what virtues are emphasized in the Christian traditions represented by their centers and institutes, and what virtues they seek to cultivate in students. Finally, we tried to represent a wide variety of virtues that represent not only intellectual components of character, which are incredibly important in a study center, but also moral, performance, and civic aspects of character. (Of note, there were virtues, namely agape-type love, that we wanted to include in our quantitative measures but could not because of an absence of scientific assessment tools; instead, we sought to explore such virtues in qualitative interviews in hopes of spurring future scientific research. )

Table 1.1. Definitions of Included Virtues

Structure of this Toolkit

The toolkit is comprised of three parts. Part 1 covers background information about character formation through assessment. In this section of the toolkit, we examine why character matters for higher education and how centers for Christian thought help college students form character. We introduce a “theory of change” that can inform program design and assessment at centers, as well as describe the three types of assessment that this toolkit is designed to help you implement.

Parts 2 and 3 of the toolkit provide the guides and tools. Part 2 specifically covers informal assessments using a personal reflection approach. In this section, we provide guides on how to conduct personal reflection via one-on-one conversations about character and virtues (Chapter 5). While many practitioners may already be experts in these types of conversations, this guide may be especially helpful in training new staff or interns . We also provide a guide for facilitating virtue worksheets within a program to help students gain the skill of recognizing and labeling virtues in their daily lives (Chapter 6). And we have created a specific worksheet for each virtue (Chapter 7). The worksheets also provide ideas for how students may set goals for growing in these virtues.

Part 3 of the toolkit provides guides and tools for conducting formal assessments. As there can sometimes be some questions about the assessment and measurement of virtues, we begin this section with an overview of the quantitative and qualitative methods for assessing virtues (Chapter 8). Then, we provide two guides. One guide focuses on conducting simple evaluations of a small program (Chapter 9). This chapter will be helpful to those centers that have intentionally designed programs aimed at cultivating the virtues we identified above. For others, we also provide a guide focused on developing a character profile of your center using the approach of organizational monitoring (Chapter 10). Other useful tools include ready-made, printable surveys for evaluating each virtue in this toolkit (Chapter 11). In that chapter, you will also find a reference table for each virtue that allows you to compare how your students are doing in comparison to students at other centers for Christian thought and other college contexts nationally. Additionally, we have created a new measurement tool, which we call the Character Index (Chapter 12). The character index allows you to assess 16 virtues in a short printable survey. Finally, we also provide you with a protocol for conducting an interview regarding character (Chapter 13). This tool also provides some guidance from our qualitative experts on analyzing the data for themes.

How to Use This Toolkit

As you just read, we have packed a lot into this toolkit. The toolkit provides three simplified approaches to virtue assessment (personal reflection, program evaluation, and organization monitoring). It has been designed with a “choose your own virtue assessment adventure” approach so that you can shape the virtue assessment to meet your organization’s needs. Here are our recommendations for using this toolkit successfully.

First, read through (or at least skim) the entire toolkit like a guidebook. Read sequentially through the chapters. Take notes about the three different assessment approaches. Notice that some approaches are more strenuous and time-consuming than others. Most importantly, identify which approach will provide the information you want from a virtue assessment. Click on the links and check out the other resources mentioned. Then, with your notes in hand, feel free to use this resource more selectively, like a reference book—jump to the sections that pertain directly to your current assessment needs.

Second, you will want to develop an assessment plan for what you think is the best assessment approach for your center. The term “assessment plan” may seem overwhelming, but it is actually quite simple—it just requires some intentionality and planning ahead.

To create your assessment plan, address the following elements:

• WHY? Assessment is about collecting information. Begin by understanding your motivation for collecting information. Ask yourself: What questions am I seeking to answer? What information do I need to address this question? What type of data am I seeking to collect? Why? You may not know all the answers to these questions, but starting with a good idea of the purpose of the assessment will help you make better decisions in creating your assessment plan.
• WHAT? What is the outcome that you want to collect information on? This requires a decision on the specific virtues to assess or, perhaps, a global assessment of character formation. As a reminder, this toolkit provides measures for a global assessment that is based on the limited selection of virtues; see above for a full list of virtues and definitions in this toolkit.
• HOW? How will we collect this information? This requires a decision on which approach to use. The three approaches used in this toolkit are personal reflection, program evaluation, and organization monitoring. Chapter 4 provides an overview of each of these approaches. Then, in Part 2 & Part 3, guides are provided for specific step-by-step instructions for each approach.
• WHICH? Which assessment tool will you use? This requires a decision on which worksheet, survey, or interview you will use to collect data. Part 2 and Part 3 of this toolkit provide you with a variety of tools to be used to collect data.
• WHEN AND WHERE? When and where will the assessment be completed? This requires decisions about the dates, times, and locations (which could be in-person or online) for assessment.
• WHO? Who will be the individual(s) responsible for coordination, data collection, analysis, and reporting? This requires a decision on personnel’s use of time.

With your completed assessment plan in place and key decisions made about the purposes and modes of assessment, you’re then ready to implement the assessment tools provided in the rest of the toolkit.