SEAHO Report - Fall 2019 - 16

SEAHO Feature Articles
Rethinking RA Training Assessment:
How Are You Gauging What RAs Are Learning?
Dylan Ruffra, Middle Tennessee State University
Recently, for the academic year, I have been given the task to lead the charge for our Department of Housing
and Residential Life's assessment initiative. This is something in which I am fluent but have never helped
run for a whole department. I decided my first task would be assessing different aspects of our department's
Resident Assistant training model. When this type of assessment had been done previously, it more often than
not seemed like an afterthought, done a couple weeks or months after training had ended. I wanted to create a
couple of different initiatives, so we could best understand what the RAs thought of training and what they were
learning.
Methods
Since I was basically starting from scratch, I reached out to a couple of Facebook groups to see what other
departments had done in the past. I knew that I wanted to create some sort of pre/post assessment to see how
things had changed and then I wanted to form a daily presentation survey to see how RAs were liking training.
There were multiple professionals from other universities that sent me their current pre/post assessments, which
were helpful in determining how I wanted to create my assessment. The two things that I had noticed were
that some institutions tried to measure what the RAs had learned and other institutions measured how RAs'
confidence had changed throughout training. When creating my pre/post assessment, I tried to incorporate both
learning and confidence related details to the position. As I started to formulate different questions, I thought of
four different areas I wanted to assess: desk policies, Housing and Residential Life policies, who to call while
on duty, and staff's confidence on all other tasks. Each of the four areas had about 7-10 questions, so in total
there were about 35-40 questions. The only identifying information collected was how many semesters they
had been an RA. I believed that returning RAs would have different responses than new RAs who are learning
this information for the first time. Both the pre/post assessment were done on paper just to make sure we could
have a better return rate. The pre-assessment was passed out during the first session of RA training and the postassessment was passed out during our closing ceremony.
The other form of assessment that was executed was done every three days during in-area time. Originally,
I was going to do an assessment of each presentation. After thinking it over, that sounded very cumbersome
and not as beneficial. What I did was broader and got their perception of different topics and not just certain
presentations. This assessment was constructed looking over training in three-day increments. Within each
three-day increment there would be a 5- 6 question survey talking about how they felt they were trained for
handling different topics, if they learned something new from the material that was presented or how beneficial
different topics were. These surveys would give us the knowledge on how different topics are useful for our
Resident Assistants and if they thought they were learning something new.
Findings/Results
It was very interesting to see the pre/post assessment results for the new RAs. The new RAs' scores for desk
responsibilities and who to call while on duty were obviously low on the pre-assessment, since they had not
done either of those things before. Surprisingly, the new RAs' scores with policy questions were mostly correct,
which I found interesting since they had never worked for Housing and Residential Life and did not need to
know the polices. For the confidence related questions on the pre-assessment, most the new RAs rated these
areas high. Of the two areas on the confidence related questions on the pre-assessment, the new RAs felt the
least confident about handling mental health situations and planning programs.
SEAHO Report Fall 2019

SEAHO Report - Fall 2019

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