Summary of 2015 ARC Report
Participation:
College Sector
Program Plans Submitted
Instruction: Transfer and Basic Skills
Astronomy
Biology
Engineering
MESA
Psychology
Reading
Criminal Justice
Instruction: Career Technical
Education
Instruction: Library
Student Services
Administrative Units
Not scheduled this year
None scheduled this year
Honors Transfer Program
Articulation
Commendations
ARC salutes the Biology Department for using equity data to identify achievement gaps
and designing interventions to improve them.
ARC commends the Engineering Department for generating recommendations for
funding that arose very specifically from SLO assessment results.
ARC applauds the Psychology Department for expanding its assessment methods and
dialog, creating a more robust culture of assessment within the department.
Successes:
Instruction
Faculty learned that most students were successful at mastering the course and certificate SLOs
as well as the skills required for each of the college core competencies. Some successes were
directly linked to classroom activities and student support:
• Labs that included leadership by both faculty and peers were shown to be more effective than
labs led by just faculty.
• Students who used the STEM center showed improved success.
1 Challenges
Instruction
When students struggled with achieving SLOs, some common themes appeared, most of
which echoed those identified in last year’s report. Departments noted the following areas of
concern and proposed innovative and often cross-departmental solutions to address them:
•
Problems with writing and reading skills (noted by two programs). Some programs created
specific, successful interventions to deal with the challenges including a discipline specific
writing course proposed by Criminal Justice, and curriculum changes in Reading.
•
Lack of basic study skills (noted by three programs). Proposed solutions included a
discipline-specific study skills course for Biology students.
•
Issues in critical thinking. The most pressing concern identified this year is to increase
effective critical thinking skills (noted by four programs). Departments noted the following
student challenges:
o Moving from small data to larger concepts.
o Learning a foundational skill and applying it to a problem.
o Moving from memorization of facts to an analysis of those facts.
Departments responded to the lack of critical thinking skills by implementing measures to
teach critical thinking tools specific to their discipline.
Administrative Units:
• The committee struggled with the new department plan template approved by
Administrative Council because the new format isn’t as comprehensive as previous
versions and didn’t allow for analysis of data. ARC was unable to identify any
assessment issues or patterns to report.
•
Two administrative units that were scheduled to submit their department plan this year
did not do so.
ARC’s Analysis of Campus Assessment Processes
•
Instruction
Departmental Leadership: For the second year in a row ARC observed the impact of
leadership change in transforming a department’s assessment practices into a more robust
culture of inquiry.
Assessment Analysis: ARC observed a continuing increase in sophistication of
assessment efforts, with several departments choosing to reexamine the efficacy of their
2 assessment instruments, further embracing the process to make it more useful. •
•
Administrative Units
The new template designed for use by administrative units does not contain sufficient
information to analyze AUO assessment strengths and challenges. Additionally, some of
the web pages devoted to department planning reports do not clearly distinguish
department plans from annual updates.
The timetable used by administrative departments outside of Instruction may not be clear,
or clearly communicated, as evidenced by the two missing department plans.
ARC’s Recommendations:
For teaching and learning, the committee recommends that:
• The student lack of basic reading, writing, and critical thinking skills continues to be an ongoing, critical issue across the curriculum that negatively impacts student success. This issue
was first highlighted in last year’s ARC report. ARC recommends dialog among all
departments in order to better address how reading and writing are taught and integrated into
our courses, and to identify ways to teach and practice these basic tools that better enable
students to turn them into the building blocks necessary to learn the components of collegelevel critical thinking.
• In order to facilitate more cross-departmental dialog, ARC recommends a prototype project
where two departments assessing the core competency of Critical Thinking meet together to
share results and propose interventions to improve student learning. If it proves successful, it
could be expanded to more departments next year.
For Improving Assessment Processes, the committee recommends that:
• The new Administrative Unit program plan templates be re-examined and revised. • A schedule for submission of regular administrative unit program and department plans
should be created and made readily available to all impacted departments.
• ARC needs to work with administrative units to more effectively communicate the goals,
benefits, and processes involved in outcomes assessment.
• Terminology for what has historically been referred to as “Program Planning” be reviewed, to
maintain consistency with the use of the term “departments” to identify people, and
“program” to identify courses of study.
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