Matthew Shadle, academic assessment coordinator in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, works at the intersection between faculty, students, and curriculum design across the college's undergraduate programs. He engages directly with educators to examine how well their programs are achieving their learning goals, and to help them act on what they find.

Shadle spent years as a faculty member at Loras College and Marymount University, serving on assessment committees at both institutions. That background informs how he approaches his work at Iowa: he understands what faculty care about, and he knows how to make assessment relevant.

His efforts span two areas: the assessment of CLAS undergraduate programs and the assessment of the CLAS Core, the college's general education curriculum. For undergraduate programs, he helps departments map their curricula, identify gaps between intended and actual student learning outcomes, and develop plans for improvement. 

"A lot of what I do in a typical week is correspond back and forth with faculty, because one of the most important aspects of my job is working with the different undergraduate programs on how they can improve the student learning experience," he said. "The job is more interpersonal than people might expect."

He also co-chairs the General Education Curriculum Committee, which reviews CLAS Core categories on a rotating cycle. This year, the focus is Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts. 

CLAS has taken the lead role in facilitating program assessment across undergraduate programs at Iowa through Shadle's work, with the goal of making it a more meaningful process that benefits academic programs and enhances student learning.

A facilitator, not an evaluator

One of the most common misconceptions about assessment, Shadle said, is that it is primarily a compliance exercise—a matter of filling out reports to satisfy administrators or accreditors. 

"Assessment should really be connected with what faculty actually care about, like teaching their students and improving their classes," he said.

He describes his role as that of a facilitator or coach. Faculty are the experts in their disciplines, he said, and decisions about updating curricula should be theirs to make. His job is to help them gather and interpret data, name what they are seeing, and think through options for moving forward. 

He is also careful to distinguish assessment from evaluation. Assessment is not about judging a program or the people running it. It’s about understanding what works and what could be stronger, and creating the conditions for faculty to address those areas.

While Shadle's primary role involves partnering with program leaders on a rotating basis, faculty can reach out to him at any time for support, whether they have questions about curriculum design, want help interpreting student learning data, or are looking for a sounding board on assessment processes in their program. For Shadle, that engagement reflects something larger about his work. "Both the college and the faculty take seriously our commitment to constantly improve the student learning experience—to make it the best it can be," he said. 

Documenting strengths, not just gaps

Shadle emphasizes that assessment surfaces strengths as well as areas for improvement. 

When CLAS reviewed the Rhetoric requirement in 2023–24, the process confirmed that instructors were doing strong work and that students were developing meaningful skills in writing and public speaking. For faculty who already sensed this, assessment gave them documented evidence to point to.

"One of the highlights of my job is to put down on paper, with data, the great things our faculty are doing for students," he said.

The long view

The changes assessment produces tend to be incremental: a curriculum map that identifies a gap, a prerequisite that gets reconsidered, or a skill area that a program decides to develop more intentionally. Across tens of thousands of students and dozens of programs, those incremental improvements add up to something significant—and for Shadle, that's exactly the point.