Communication Between Faculty and Assessment Practitioners in Higher Education: Barriers and Strategies for Improvement

This article examines communication barriers between faculty and institutional assessment practitioners on college and university campuses. The authors explored participants’ strategies for overcoming the communication barriers. Sergiovanni’s lifeworld-systemsworld framework (LSF) and Connelly and Clandinin commonplaces of narrative inquiry (CNI) provided theoretical lenses to investigate this topic. Through 20 in-depth, semidirected interviews (15 assessment practitioners and 5 faculty), six themes were identified between two research questions: (a) misunderstood expectations about time commitment; (b) SLO assessment: not important!; (c) what happened to assessment when the world shut down?; (d) engagement + time spent = an effective communication strategy; (e) relationship building: brick by brick; and (f) a new normal: virtual assessment work. The article spotlights the theoretical implications of our findings within the broader higher education assessment literature, along with practical insights for those grappling with assessment communication challenges on their campuses.