Westmont’s Program Review Committee
Minutes
September 4, 2014
Present: Barb Kennedy, Mary Logue, Andrew Mullen, Mark Nelson, Tatiana
Nazarenko and Michael Sommermann
Absent: Dana Alexander and Bill Wright
Tatiana Nazarenko opened with prayer.
The minutes from 4/17/14 were reviewed and approved.
Tatiana encouraged the Committee to become familiar and comfortable with
LiveText as we will be using the software to evaluate reports during our
meetings. Doug Conrad who is the IT point person will be coming to our next
meeting to make a presentation on how to use a rubric for evaluating annual
reports.
We will receive four Six-year Reports from Chemistry, Math/C.S., Westmont in
San Francisco and Athletics. All committee members are responsible for reading
these reports and evaluating these reports. The draft of the rubric was distributed
for the committee members’ input.
There are 19 annual reports which are to be filed by Sept. 15th. The Committee
agreed for a variety of reasons that each report should be read by two members
with the option of asking all committee members if there are concerns or issues.
The members selected the following departments with the missing members
filling in the blanks:
Art: Mark N./Michael S
Biology: Michael S/Andrew M
Communications Studies: Mark N/_______
Economics & Business: ___________/___________
Education: Mary L/Dana A
English: Mark N/Mary L
History: Mary L/Mark N
Kinesiology: Michael S/_________
Modern Languages: Andrew/_________
Library: Andrew/___________
Music: Mary L/Michael S.
Physics: Mary L/________
Philosophy: Andrew M/Michael S
Political Science: Mark N/__________
Psychology: Michael S/Andrew M
Religious Studies: Mark N/________
Sociology/Anthropology: Andrew M/________
Student Life: Mary L/______________
Theatre Arts:__________/______________
Tatiana will hold a meeting with the Six-year Program Review Cohort including
the Departments of Biology, Communication Studies and Education on
September 16th. A separate meeting will be held with Student Life staff.
The PRC major goals for the coming year:
1. Develop the draft of the Six-year Report Template for co-curricular
departments and programs.
2. Monitor the LiveText experience. We will work closely with Doug Conrad
this fall and add a few departments to the LiveText assessment
management system in the spring.
3. Collaborate on the Informational Literacy institutional assessment project
with Molly Riley and her Assessment Team. Greg Orfalea and Katie
Calloway have agreed to assess student information literacy in their ENG002 classes. Several senior seminars or capstone courses will be
included in the assessment project in the spring. Molly Riley will be
presenting to the Senate on Sept.16 and she has volunteered to visit our
committee as well.
Tatiana reported that Jim Taylor will present the institutional assessment findings
on Critical Thinking at the Faculty Meeting on Oct. 17th. Do we want him to visit
us first? We will check and see if it would be helpful to him.
She also suggested that we should have better collaboration with the Academic
Senate and the GE Committee. One of the questions the GE Committee will be
in collaboration with the Senate is student Oral Communication skills and
competencies. There are currently only three speech intensive courses offered
on campus (and one is open only to TA majors) but 43% of courses offered in the
2013-2014 academic year had an oral communication component. The PRC
believes this is an issue which should be dealt with in the GE meetings.
The Committee reviewed report rubrics which will be posted on the Educational
Effectiveness website. It was suggested to include evidence of collaboration and
communication in the rubrics categories and post the Self-Check tool
departments to evaluate the quality of their mission statements, PLO’s, levels of
mastery articulated by these PLO’s, etc. Tatiana has agreed to send the revised
template of the rubric to the committee members next week.
Recorded by,
Barb Kennedy