How do we assess an early arrival program? Well, you begin with our goals. What do you want this program to achieve? For our early arrival program, we first set the following goals for student participants:

• 1- A sense of purpose for obtaining a college degree 
• 2- A sense of belonging at the University 
• 3- Experience with the college learning process
• 4- Academic Skills
• 5- Wellness Skills     

Second, you collect a lot of general feedback to help you improve. We were curious to learn about how everyone enjoyed their program experience overall. So we designed feedback surveys to learn about:

• Did student participants learn something new and valuable from the academic sessions? Did they enjoy the social activities? What was their experience like with their mentors?
• Did student mentors learn something useful from their training program? Did they feel prepared for their jobs? Did they enjoy their overall experience?
• How did our program partners (University staff) find their overall experience providing sessions for our students? Would they partner with us again?

Once you find out your program goals and the outcomes that you’d like to assess, you’ll be on your way to design tools (mostly surveys) to help you to collect data and assess your program.

For a summary of how I did this for the CONNECT program, please see the document below.