The ITA is a perception survey that helps institutional leaders identify and discuss a current snapshot of how well they think they are doing in areas that are important for achieving student success and equity. Institutions use the ITA in different ways that work for them—to identify improvement opportunities, to use as an annual review to assess progress, or to provide input into strategic planning or accreditation reporting. It’s important to define how the ITA fits into an institution’s continuous improvement processes and communicate that to the leadership team.
100+ question Transformation Team version: 45–60 minutes
30+ Student Success Community question version: 15–20 minutes
Participants are not required to complete the survey in one sitting and can log back into their Gardner Institute Platform account to continue.
The ITA builds on research and observations from the Frontier Set initiative. This work showed that institutional transformation—the realignment of structure, culture and business model to create a student experience that results in equitable improvements in outcomes and educational value—requires institutions to integrate inclusive practices and coherent learning environments designed with students in mind while leveraging a student-centered mission, catalytic leadership, strategic data use, and strategic finance in a robust continuous improvement process. The ITA’s structure reflects this integrated approach. It helps an institution learn more about its areas of strength and improvement in each of the categories, which are all critical input to prioritizing and planning further action to enhance equitable student success.
Depending on your institution, you may use some or all of the ITA’s categories. Also, in time, more questions and categories may be added to the ITA.
For more information about institutional transformation, the Transformation Model, and plenty of examples of transformation journeys, visit postsecondarytransformation.org.
There are topic areas that you may have a strong, working familiarity with and some that are completely unfamiliar. This is okay! Responding with “I don’t know” to these unfamiliar questions is fine. Additionally, there is an option to select “Not applicable” to questions pertaining to practices not applicable to your institution. Completing the entire survey across all topic areas can lead to valuable realizations where people can see connections between their work and the work others lead. This builds awareness of areas that seem unrelated but often have a lot of intersections.
Only the participant will have access to their individual results via the summary report generated when they complete the ITA.
Institution-level results are anonymized and do not contain participant names or emails. Institutions have access to de-identified data.
Each institution will have exclusive access to its own results. Note that if an institution is taking the ITA in association with an organization such as a larger consortium managed by an intermediary, results may be shared with that intermediary to help them define or improve their services. Institutions should sign their own memorandum of understanding with the intermediary should they want to share de-identified unit record data. The intermediaries have access to aggregate summary data.
The Gardner Institute manages the survey and data collection process. It has access to data, and per data sharing agreements, may use results and data for evaluation purposes.
Intermediaries can be consulted for a list of other participating institutions in their initiative, but a master list of past and present participating institutions is not readily available to be shared in the live dashboard. Each institution is limited to seeing their own data in their dashboard and not the results of other institutions.
Intermediaries have dashboard access to results across all participating institutions in their initiative. You are able to look across a range of institutions and make connections. Some examples include: pairing for mentorship, creating cohorts with similar needs, and creating place-based cohorts.
Postsecondary institutions may partner with multiple networks or associations in different ways. The ITA may be used by any of these intermediaries to support their work. “Institutional overlap” occurs when an institution is invited to participate in the ITA by more than one intermediary at the same time, or when an institution has taken the ITA in the past with a different intermediary.
We recommend that intermediaries check with their member institutions during planning if they have previously deployed the ITA, or if they anticipate other memberships that might use the ITA. Once an institutional overlap has been identified, there are several options:
We advise against having more than two intermediaries work with the same institution at the same time. This may place undue burden on the institution, and there is the potential that too many intermediary staff during the Sensemaking Conversation creates a power dynamic that leads to a less productive discussion.
Additionally, we recommend that institutions not be required to take the ITA more than once per academic year. If a second intermediary plans to engage an institution in the same academic year as an institution’s ITA administrator, existing data can be accessed to inform strategic conversations and technical assistance planning.
The ITA cannot be customized at this time. However, our team is looking for ways to improve the institution’s experience and this may be possible in the future.
Your institutional or intermediary contact is the primary source for answering questions about the Institutional Transformation Assessment. Please reach out to them directly. For additional guidance, you may reach ITA support at itasupport@gardnerinstitute.org.
