Date: Monday, November 24, 2025
Hello! We are Dr. Christiane Herber-Valdez, Dr. Alyssa Cervantes-Benavides, and Dr. Julie Blow, a team of higher education professionals in the Office of Academic Affairs at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso. We work in the areas of program development, evaluation, assessment, and accreditation, and we’d like to share how our evaluation of TECHReady, the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), has evolved into a model of continuous improvement and how it is creating lasting impact in our classrooms and community.
TECHReady is our institution-wide initiative to strengthen student learning through Interprofessional Education (IPE). In IPE, students from different health professions learn about, from, and with each other to improve teamwork and patient outcomes. Through TECHReady, our students enrolled in nursing, medicine, dental medicine and biomedical sciences degree programs, engage in structured activities that help them understand each profession’s role, build trust, and practice communication in real-world settings. These experiences reinforce values like mutual respect, integrity, and shared accountability, all vital for high-functioning healthcare teams.
Over time, we have expanded TECHReady beyond classroom instruction to include service learning and community-based engagement activities. Students now collaborate in off- campus outreach clinics, community health fairs, and public health projects that directly respond to local healthcare needs and address regional workforce shortages. These opportunities allow students to apply interprofessional teamwork skills, while serving the El Paso community—improving access to care, health education, and providing much needed healthcare services in the region.
TECHReady’s evaluation was never meant to be just a checkbox for accreditation and compliance. We designed it as a learning system, ensuring a continuous feedback loop that collects and shares a wide variety of data, from students’ attitudes and competencies to qualitative feedback and multi-view observations. Always keeping an eye on the often overlooked last column of logic models, we also regularly evaluate impact—not just on our students, but on our programs, our culture, and our community. Keeping in close touch with community partners and the needs of our region—a federally designated health-profession shortage area, we regularly evaluate broad impact outcomes as part of annual evaluation.
Longitudinal results demonstrated direct benefits among our students, with high engagement and measurable gains in IPE attitudes and students’ confidence across all degree programs. But what we’re most proud of is how evaluation findings have led to tangible change: refined curricular design, better coordination across our academic disciplines—nursing, medicine and biomedical science—and stronger partnerships with community organizations. Students are now entrenched in our community, gaining valuable learning experiences while making a difference for patient populations.
Include measures of community impact in your evaluation plan to demonstrate value beyond the institution and connect data to real-world outcomes that matter to students, faculty, and community members alike. Design your evaluation incorporating questions that measure multi-level impact—and don’t be afraid to inquire about culture or systemic change. Often these outcomes are not realized by program administrators, until the relevant evaluation questions are asked by the evaluator.
When evaluation is shared, discussed, and acted upon, it becomes a catalyst for improvement for the program and everyone it touches. With TECHReady, evaluative thinking helped us build a culture of collaboration, innovation, and community responsibility.
Evaluation done well can transform not just students, but institutions and communities. For us, it has been the bridge between learning and service, demonstrating that continuous, evidence-informed reflection does not just strengthen education; it strengthens the people and places we serve.
To learn more, visit the TechReady Homepage and our Office of Academic Affairs Website.
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