There’s an office right off the escalator on BMCC’s main campus building’s 7th floor that students sometimes wander into, asking for directions to their next class, or to their professor’s office. After receiving the information they need, they go on their busy way without realizing what office they were in.
It happens to be BMCC’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, which doesn’t have a lot of direct contact with students outside of the occasional straggler. But that doesn’t mean their work isn’t crucial to the success of BMCC students.
“We provide data for various offices and academic departments that help them understand the student population,” said Dr. Melissa Bolyard, the Director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment.
“We are responsible for providing data and analyses in support of planning made at the college … in terms of programs that work in helping students understand their area of study, in terms of evaluating students’ performance in developmental skills courses, as well as providing data in terms of assessing how well our service areas are helping students meet their goals here at BMCC.” said Bolyard.
One of the ways Dr. Bolyard and her staff are able to get all of that information is through surveys, which they conduct often to assess various aspects of student life at BMCC. The office also puts out the BMCC Factbook on a yearly basis, which is the school’s principal source of information on things like enrollment, financial aid awards and the success of programs at the college. It reached nearly 100 pages last year.
For example: “This office administers a survey of student learning every spring semester in which we ask students their perceptions of what they’ve learned in the classroom,” according to Bolyard. “We feed the results of that survey back to faculty, who then use that to identify ways that they improve their teaching in the classroom.”
Bolyard and her staff then follow that up with faculty, asking them about how they’ve tried to improve classroom learning. Those results are fed back to respective departments as a way of coming up with new classroom techniques to help students learn better.
And now it’s all available on the office’s new Web site. From the Factbook to surveys and assessment, everything it provides is now available on the Internet. It’s all part of the office’s overarching goal to ensure all services being provided to the BMCC students are helping them meet their goals at the college.
To visit the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment’s Web site, click here.
