Janet Easterling
Biography
Before joining Seton Hall University in 1998, Janet Easterling was a medical outcomes data analyst. She spent 20 years working primarily on research projects concerned with improving health outcomes and medical resources utilization. Her outcomes assessment experience includes¨ 6 years analyzing clinical trials data for a national collaborative research group in the U.K. [as research assistant and member of the British National Lymphoma Investigation core, located within the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London)
¨ 10 years facilitating medical outcome and medical resource utilization research projects at the University of San Francisco California [as both designer and user of a large medical outcomes data bank, and member of an informatics group in the Department of Laboratory Medicine within UCSF School of Medicine]. The goal of much of the research effort was to improve systems that adjust for (severity of illness) case-mix such that more meaningful comparisons between groups of patients could be made.
¨ 2 years [as a systems analyst] at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. (Plainsboro, NJ) facilitating the collection of responses to national surveys (conducted on behalf of state and federal government, and organizations such as Robert Wood Johnson) about health, education and other social policies and domestic programs.
In 1998, Janet Easterling joined the staff of Seton Hall as Institutional Research Associate within the Planning Office. She was hired initially to coordinate, track and evaluate a new faculty-student mentoring program. From that experience she gained an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges to learning and teaching in today's undergraduate environment. In the last two years, her role at the University has evolved and expanded into a number of other areas that relate to assessment of student learning or student satisfaction with the learning environments at Seton Hall. She is a key member of the University Retention Committee, coordinates the administration and dissemination of results of cohort surveys - in particular, the CIRP for freshman and NSSE for freshmen and seniors, has worked closely with the Political Science department as they planned their program review and conducted internal evaluations, worked with the Outcomes Assessment Team to facilitate and increase assessment at the program level, participated in meetings of the Mobile Computing Assessment team as it evaluates the impact of the increasing uses of IT to enhance first year curriculum and improve student access to academic resources, and has struggled, along with other members of a small assessment research group to frame answerable and meaningful research questions with the objective of going beyond descriptions of student responses to satisfaction survey questions, an important but insufficient assessment objective. With increasing opportunities to participate in planning discussions for assessment of quality at different levels, Janet's personal strategy is to maintain and to encourage in others a focus on the broader and longer term objective, to further the understanding of the Seton Hall community of how its students learn and what contributes to the quality of their learning experience.