Bringing People Together: Sustaining Cross-Departmental Engagement in Program Assessment (Agricultural and Food Systems)

One of the most durable lessons in the assessment literature is that meaningful program assessment is never the work of a single person or office. It depends on bringing many voices to the table and keeping them there. As the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) found in its study of institutions that use assessment well, the practices most aligned with effective assessment principles included engaging faculty in and fostering ownership of assessment, and sharing information widely about assessment and its results to both internal and external audiences. The most effective programs took the time to build their assessment efforts bit by bit over a number of years, working toward a collective understanding of what the assessment of student learning meant for that program.

WSU’s Agricultural and Food Systems (AFS) program provides an example of what that kind of continuous, relationship-based assessment work can look like. The BS in Agricultural and Food Systems is an interdisciplinary degree built on a shared core curriculum. It spans five distinct majors and draws faculty from multiple departments, such as Crop and Soil Sciences and the School of Economic Sciences, across more than one campus. That reach includes a new major on the Everett campus, expanding educational and applied learning opportunities for students on the west side of the state. A structure this complex could easily fragment assessment work. Instead, the faculty assessment coordinator has made bringing people together a central focus.

That engagement runs on a few dependable structures. At the center is the Curriculum, Assessment and Planning Committee, chaired by the Crop and Soil Sciences department chair, with fifteen members representing each of the five AFS majors, along with faculty and advisors from both the Pullman and Everett campuses. Additionally, the assessment coordinator keeps momentum going through a steady schedule of meetings and events, including two annual retreats held the Thursday of finals week in May and December that are open to all faculty. These retreats are built as hands-on working sessions. At one May retreat, faculty brought examples of job descriptions that they felt their students should be able to meet. They analyzed these descriptions and desired career paths for each major to substantiate necessary competencies (i.e. skills, knowledge, and experience) needed for graduating seniors.

Further, in 2026, the assessment coordinator convened a volunteer planning committee that met repeatedly over the summer to keep the spring retreat’s progress moving. The explicit aim was to integrate the retreat feedback into a summer workplan that builds on the momentum from the retreat. The group reviewed the common core together to ask whether courses were meeting employer needs, conducted a curriculum map review to identify gaps, overlap, and opportunities for coordination, and weighed how the pieces of a multi-major program fit together, including which majors should continue to stand alone and which might better serve students as concentrations. That work, which was grounded in several years of focus group findings and direct assessment data, resulted in a full redesign of all five majors, a streamlined AFS core, and closer alignment with UCORE requirements, giving students more meaningful choice in how they pursue their degree. This work has also generated a growing menu of career pathways that connect AFS students to aligned fields, drawing on existing WSU programs as well as employer-identified competencies gathered directly through the committee’s ongoing relationships with industry and alumni.

Holly Henning has led AFS’s undergraduate program assessment for many years in her role as faculty assessment coordinator. “The focus of the AFS assessment activities for the past several years has been to engage more stakeholders in the review of the current program and overall curriculum,” she explains. “Our chair, Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, provides tremendous support in engaging faculty, and her deep employer and alumni relationships help ensure the resulting curriculum reflects not just what assessment data reveal, but where the field is headed.”

ACE extends its appreciation to the faculty and leadership who have engaged in the AFS program’s assessment activities. For additional examples highlighting successful stories of program assessment at WSU, see ACE’s assessment spotlights. ACE is also available to consult with undergraduate degree programs to tailor program assessment approaches to best meet the needs of the program; contact us for additional information.