136: Co-Creating Change: Elevating Voices and Building Shared Leadership in Academic Advising Evaluation

Evaluation capacity building empowers and elevates the voices of stakeholders, fostering community engagement by ensuring that evaluation, instead of being conducted in isolation, promotes shared leadership among stakeholders. This project evaluates an academic advising program for a small, mid-south university. The evaluation goal was to determine students’ needs as they pertained to academic advising and best academic advising practices for diverse students. The evaluation consisted of a needs assessment and a triangulation of data from multiple sources, including institutional data, surveys, and qualitative data. Evaluators actively involved academic advisors in instrument development and reporting, positioning them as co-leaders in the process. This presentation provides case study details about the evaluation. While those in the field of academic advising will benefit from this presentation, internal evaluators who must navigate the challenges of creating evaluation and assessment that could impact their colleagues will also benefit.

George Chitiyo; Elizabeth Powell