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An open letter to our students
Editor's note. Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter that goes out every month to faculty and staff. This month's issue is an open letter by Pete Ellertsen, assessment committee chair and newsletter editor. It is addressed particularly to students, but its message is for everybody in the SCI community.
April 2 is SCI's first Assessment Day. You are being asked to help us maintain the high quality of education at SCI - and make it even better. It is an important step in our re-accreditation process, and we need you to help us make it work.
At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 2:
"I cannot stress too much how vital it is to SCI's future that everyone cooperate in a mutually respectful manner," said Jeff Mueller, Dean of the College. "The information we gather on Assessment Day will help us design the academic programs you need to compete in a constantly changing economy, and to streamline the college's administrative procedures. We are required to do this as we seek reaccreditation, and we will use the information in a cycle of continuous improvement for the benefit of all students on the SCI campus."
Both Dean Broeckling's survey and the CAAP test are designed to help us know how to serve you better. The student affairs questionnaire asks you to evaluate SCI services like the library, the learning center, student housing and activities. At the same time, the results from the reading test will help us evaluate how well we're doing in helping you learn what you need to know as college students. The reason we're giving you a reading test, instead of math or some other area, is that we believe reading is a basic skill that cuts across all of our curricula.
Here's the key: We are giving you the CAAP test to find out how we're doing. If your score isn't as high as you'd like it to be, we won't hold it against you. But if you score in the 99th percentile, you can brag about it and list it on your resume! In other words, taking the CAAP will help you - but it can't hurt you.
When you finish taking the tests, we'll send them off to ACT Inc. to be scored. Then we will compare the overall, or aggragate, scores of SCI students to those of other students who have taken ACT Inc. tests at other schools. This process of comparison, which is called "norming," allows us to see how we're doing compared to other colleges and universities. The comparative data we gather, in turn, will be a crucial part of the evidence we are required to present to the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges when we apply for reaccreditation in 2004 and 2005.
So we are taking Assessment Day very seriously. But we're all in it together. Remember: We're asking you to help us help you! So we're raffling off prizes, and we're following the CAAP test and the student affairs survey with a free food day on Gingko Square. It's the least we can do to say thanks.
Details (and a link) about the CAAP test
The Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) reading test lasts 40 minutes and measures learning in two areas: (1) reading skills, including the ability to "recognize main ideas of paragraphs and passages, to identify important factual information, and to identify relationships among different components of textual information;" and (2) reasoning skills, including "ability to determine meaning from context, to infer main ideas and relationships, to generalize and apply information beyond the immediate context, to draw appropriate conclusions, and to make appropriate comparisons." Readings are drawn from prose fiction, humanities, social studies and natural science. Visit http://www.act.org/caap/ for sample questions and more information (if you're reading this in hard copy - i.e. on paper - you can get here by going to the SCI website, clicking on the "Policies and Procedures" menu under "Resources," following the "Learning Outcomes Assessment" link to Nuts & Bolts).
-- Pete Ellertsen, chair, Assessment Committee
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by the Assessment Committee of Springfield College in Illinois.
Members of the Assessment Committee are: Bob Blankenberger; Susan Full; Alice Gutierrez; Kathleen Killion; Penny Leonhard; Scott McCullar; Steve Stowers; Jeff Mueller and Kevin Broeckling (ex officio); and Pete Ellertsen, chair. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at ellertsen@sci.edu.