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TOCAR
Assessment Committee
Minutes for
March 5, 2002
Present:
Richard Chapman, Loren Haagenson,
September Luitjens, Charles Okigbo, Kay Schneider, Dan Sperling
The
purpose of the meeting was to continue development of the survey
instrument. We discussed whether we should define "racism"
in the survey. Some people tend to respond negatively to this word,
so we decided that instead of defining the term, the responses to
the survey questions could give us insights to people's various
interpretations of the term. Rather than list each college/university for each question,
we decided to use the term "institution" to refer to the
four campuses.
We
discussed the need to consider the ability to make comparisons over
time as we are developing the instrument. Including questions so
that we can make "before and after" comparisons would be
very useful.
The
team commented that the link between anti-racism training and the
survey are not very direct. Should we ask survey respondents if they
have attended anti-racism training?
Relatively few people will have completed training at the
time we administer the survey, but we want to find a way to ensure
that survey results will provide information that will be useful to
the TOCAR teams on each campus.
At
the last meeting, we defined the following list of topics to be
included in the instrument:
·
Institutional
barriers to success
·
Expectations
·
Courses,
learning, curriculum
·
Community:
media coverage, housing, retail racial profiling
·
Student
life issues, including on-campus housing
·
Student
services: admissions,
recruitment, retention and student life issues
·
Discrimination/prejudice-how
often do incidents occur?
·
Past
experiences with diversity, prejudice, etc. prior to coming to this
community
·
Campus
climate, social environment, interracial dating, families
·
Faculty,
staff, administrative aspects: hiring, promotion, tenure
The
first two topics, institutional barriers to success and
expectations, will not be separate sections on the survey. We intend
that these issues be addressed through questions in the other eight
sections.
We
decided that the administration of two separate surveys would enable
us to have each survey be a bit longer and easier to complete than
if the surveys were combined. One
advantage is that this will enable us to compare faculty's opinions
on how they treat students and students' opinions on how faculty
treat them. Dan will
develop a version of the survey for students that includes all of
the questions we have developed. Kay will develop a version of the
survey for faculty, staff, and administrators that includes all of
the questions we have developed.
At the next meeting we will discuss which questions need to
be added to and deleted from the surveys.
We
discussed format of questions and Charles indicated he supports use
of the format of question one on page one of the Teagle survey. We
want to try to have some consistency on the format of the questions
and responses to make it easy to complete. But, other formats may be
needed for some sections of the surveys. We also agreed to try to
limit each survey to four pages.
The drafts will include surveys questions arranged by topic,
in this order:
1.
Past experiences with diversity, prejudice, etc. prior to
coming to this community
2.
Community: media
coverage, housing, retail racial profiling
3.
Campus climate, social environment, interracial dating,
families
4.
Discrimination/prejudice-how often do incidents occur?
5.
Courses, learning, curriculum
6.
Student life and students services issues, including
on-campus housing, admissions,
recruitment, retention and student life issues (for student
survey)
7.
Faculty, staff, administrative aspects: hiring, promotion,
tenure (for faculty, staff, admin
survey)
8.
Demographic questions
Charles
volunteered to share the drafts of the surveys with the computer
services staff at NDSU to determine if they can develop a version of
the survey that can be scanned by computer equipment.
Next meeting: March 19
at 3:15 in at NDSU in the "University Chamber" room of the
Memorial Union on the second floor at the far south end and off to
the left on that floor. |
