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English program assessment 'portends potential'
One of the things we're going to be stressing this year on the Assessment Committee is program assessment. It's something we committed to do in 1996, and again in 2001 when we reported to the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools on how we were doing with assessment. We've had it on the back burner the last couple of years while we got General Education testing up and running again. But now it's time to stoke up the fire, and start cooking.
Luckily, we have a good model for program assessment right on campus. And it's one the North Central Association has specifically recommended we follow. It is the "PDSA Cycle" of assessment and planning for continuous improvement we use in the Division of Languages and Literature. PDSA stands for "Plan-Do-Study-Act." It's a planning strategy that division chair Judi Anderson brought home from an NCA conference, and it's designed to ensure that decisions are made on the basis of data - the "Study" piece in PDSA - and the data are cycled back into the planning process for continuous improvement.
Just before deadline, we received more information about the AQIP "conversation day" to be held from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14. So we'll get the October issue of Nuts & Bolts to you early. To make this new alternative to NCA's accreditation review process work for SCI, we all need to get behind it.
As a member of the English department, I've been working with the PDSA Cycle since before I knew what assessment even was. When I joined SCI's full-time faculty in 1995, we were faced with an urgent need to modify our developmental English program. An NCA site visit team had just reported, "With larger numbers of students needing some type of [academic] intervention, this institution, like so many others, must begin to find effective ways to serve this population. Springfield College should be considering the expansion of its array of developmental courses and should review the supporting academic services that help to ensure success of at-risk students." Retention was a problem throughout the college, as NCA noted, and English composition was clearly part of the problem. In the one 090-level English course we offered at the time, the success rate often got as low as 30 to 50 percent.
In 1997 we hired a specialist in developmental English, Lynette Shaw-Smith, who came to us from Parkland Community College. She was already familiar not only with teaching basic writers but also with assessment, since Parkland's is one of the strongest programs in downstate Illinois. When she taught English 111, the first semester comp course, she was able to track how well a cohort of her developmental students did. "One of them withdrew because he was failing, and the other two received low Ds. They weren't ready for English 111 based on their writing." In Language and Literature Division meetings, we went over Lynette's data and studied course offerings in Illinois community colleges with comparable student demographics.
As English teachers we thought it important to compare our offerings to other two-year colleges because we are committed to the Illinois Articulation Initiative, and we send the entire department to the annual Allerton articulation conference hosted by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Not only is our entire freshman English composition program geared to eventual mastery of the competencies, or skills, stipulated in the IAI written composition sequence, but commitment to IAI is an important part of the College's assessment plan as well. So we had plenty to think about in division meetings.
"After all of our research and discussions, we [also] decided to do something that I have heard many English professors discuss at the Allerton English Articulation Conference - increase the developmental English courses from three credits to four credits," Lynette later reported. She added, "Before the increase in hours, students would take nine hours of developmental and six hours of 100-level courses to be at 15 hours. Then, these students would often struggle and not do well in courses that they were not yet prepared for."
So in the fall of 1999, SCI joined other two-year colleges across Illinois in offering a two-semester sequence of four-hour courses in developmental English composition in order to serve a type of student who came to college without the educational advantages of earlier students. At the same time, Lynette was tracking student success in other courses.
"Because we did assessment, we made an additional change to the developmental English courses," Lynette said. "I had been hearing many students in my English 098 and English 099 classes complain about how hard their 100-level classes were and how much trouble they were having. So I asked them to tell me in a Minute Paper [a classroom assessment technique] what courses they were having the most trouble in, and the number one answer was psychology. Then, I talked to [psychology instructor] Pat Giacomini, and we went through her roster and discovered that students in English 098 and English 099 were getting D's and E's. I talked to other instructors who told me the developmental English students were also struggling in their courses." Consequently, advisers were asked to be careful about placing developmental students in appropriate 100- and 200-level courses. Lynette said increasing the credit for developmental courses helped, too: "Since the increase in credit hours, if students place into two developmental English courses and MAT 097, they only have to take one 100-level course, and we try to be careful about choosing the 100-level courses to put them in; therefore, more developmental English students can be successful in their first semester."
The numbers tell the rest of the story. "Fall 1999 was our first semester of English 095 and English 099 and the first semester that these courses were four hours," Lynette reported. "Only one student in English 095 got no credit. The rest went on to English 099. Of the English 095 students in English 099 in Spring 2000, only one got a 'no credit.' The rest went on to English 111 in Fall of 2000. Of these students, 100% were successful in English 111 after doing the two-semester developmental writing sequence. The lowest grade any of these students received was a C+." In 2001, four semesters after the changes went into effect, Lynette reported a 100 percent retention rate for her Fall 1999 reading class, a 90 percent retention rate for her Fall 1999 grammar class and a 73 percent retention rate for students in her two paragraph-to-essay (ENG 099) classes. Success rates have continued at comparable levels.
Since then, we've continued to monitor the success of our developmental students and moved on to a similar evaluation of what we want our students to learn in the ENG 111-112 composition sequences, how we propose to measure it and what changes we might consider in response to the data we collect on learning outcomes. Planning for continuous improvement is, well, in a word, continuous.
We're proud of what we've accomplished in the Languages and Literature Division, even though sometimes our recommendations haven't been followed. Our program assessment plan was incorporated into SCI's overall assessment plan when it was amended in 2001, and we've achieved some recognition for our use of student learning outcomes in planning for continuous improvement. At Allerton in 2001 Lynette, Judi and I presented a workshop at the 37th annual College and University English Articulation Conference on "Closing the Loop: Assessment in the Springfield College English Department." But perhaps the most welcome recognition of all came when Dr. Taylor of NCA evaluated SCI's amended assessment plan in 2001.
"Assessment at SCI remains a work in progress," Dr. Taylor wrote in a staff analysis dated Aug. 28 of that year. "The College attributes its lack of great progress in an institutionalized assessment commitment to administrative changes in personnel and to changes in the direction and foci of the assessment program. However, assessment of student learning is now an administrative priority." he added that "a core group of faculty are committed to develop a College-wide assessment process to (1) enhance and improve student learning; (2) assess learning outcomes; and (3) provide assessment data for the College planning and budgeting processes. The College has made least progress in this last area. However, to fulfill #1 and #2 above, the College is working to build 'a culture of assessment' to help faculty take ownership of these assessment process and to recognize its value to their programs." Dr. Taylor noted that we have a long way to go at SCI, remarking that assessment is primarily conducted by individual instructors rather than at the program level. But, he added, "SCI provides an example of the uses of assessment to enhance student learning in its report from the Languages/Literature Division. This single example portends the potential of a fully implemented assessment plan."
Assessment committee members named
Members of the Assessment Committee for the 2003-04 school year are: Moses Allen, student; Bob Blankenberger, history, humanities and behavioral sciences chair; Alice Gutierrez, math, computer science, network administrator and MIT director; Scott McCullar, fine arts, webmaster and creative design director; Dave Saner, economics and business; Steve Stowers, math and computer science, and Barb Tanzyus, math; Kevin Broeckling, dean of students; and Jeff Mueller, dean of the college. Pete Ellertsen, English and communications, chairs the panel.
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by the Assessment Committee of Springfield College in Illinois.
If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at ellertsen@sci.edu.
