September 11, 2006

10:00 a.m.
Bridges Hall 250B

Present: Tim Borchers, chair; Ted Gracyk, Jody Mattern, Amy Phillips, Peggy Rittenhouse, Stacy Voeller, Alison Wallace

Minutes: Moved by Gracyk, seconded by Voeller to approve the August 28, 2006 minutes. The motion was approved unanimously.

Update on SLOAC Presentations: Borchers updated the committee on SLOAC information presentations held for department chairs and assessment coordinators on September 5 and 6, 2006. The “new and improved” assessment guidebook for academic programs was distributed. Borchers added that he has been meeting with departments when asked.

Chemistry Plan and Report:

• The department is using multiple assessment measures;
• Suggest added direct measures,
• Need to define the rating scale with specific identifiers;
• Suggest reducing from a 1-5 scale to a 1-3 scale;
• Feedback is missing on student research progress report;
• Plan does not assess content knowledge;
• Exit survey has some useful information, but it is not necessarily related to student learning outcome;
• Suggest the department delve deeper to locate areas for improvement;
• Suggest the department review national information/governing bodies for ways to addressing communication within the discipline;
• Suggest the effectiveness outcomes be dropped from the plan;
• Suggest that identifying names be redacted from the report.

Counseling and Student Affairs:

• Plan submitted is a new plan and is favorable overall;
• The program has done a nice job of collapsing all assessment into a succinct list of student learning outcomes,
• Are the rubrics under each student learning outcome more detailed? Need to submit the rubrics to SLOAC for review;
• Lacking a minimum score for the Counselor Preparation Comprehensive Exam;
• Need to submit copies of the exams;
• Research student learning outcome lacks specified in class assessment measure and the level of expected performance is unclear.

Special Education Report:

• Report is straight forward
• All goals met --- are their students that good or goals too low;
• Record of department consultation missing;
• No indication of how the results will be used to improve the program, just continuing to observe.

Borchers agreed to provide the respective departments/programs with SLOAC feedback.

Accredited Programs: Discussion ensued on what information should be submitted by accredited programs. It was suggested that a link to each program’s institutional report and final accreditation report/response from the state/national agency would be sufficient.

Borchers reported that he and Rittenhouse met during the summer with Charlie Howell, Chair of the School of Teaching and Learning, and Teri Walseth, Associate Dean of Education and Human Services, to discuss assessment of Teacher Preparation programs. The meeting resulted in the need to separate NCATE and Board of Teaching (BOT) assessment. It was noted that student teaching evaluation would be linked to BOT standards in the future using a 3-point scale. Follow up meetings with each program would be held in the future.

Instructional Improvement Grants: Discussion on whether grants are limited to one per department or one per program opened. It was agreed the intent is one grant application per report, so if a department has multiple programs and provides multiple reports (one per program) it would be acceptable to submit multiple grant applications. It was suggested that the grant recipient and department/program secretary receive notice along with the academic dean when grants awards are announced.

The meeting adjourned at 10:56 a.m.

Next Meeting: The next scheduled meeting is October 23, 2006 and it is anticipated that review of Philosophy and Biosciences plans will be on the agenda. Phillips agreed to report on the Social Work grant at the November meeting.

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