Meeting Summary June 8th

Carmen Velasquez and some students visited our meeting! We showed the students some of the resources on the web for our General Education assessment efforts this past year. We discussed how to better get this information to students. One idea would be to get the information in a more accessible place on our college web site. Another idea was to connect the six competencies to student efforts in student clubs and activities. We explained some of the details of the assessment process and gave the students the findings files from Spring 11 to give them an idea of the data that we collect. One finding from Spring 11 was that many of the students (47%) in our sample had dropped their courses -- this was unexpected because the students in the sample had taken 45 or more credit hours. Students offered that sometimes students close to graduation are very "GPA conscious" and they might drop classes to preserve a high GPA. It came out in the meeting that these students were not all aware of the 3 peat rule, 120 hour rule, 6 drop rule, and limits on financial aid. We discussed some ways to get this information to students - an idea that was suggested was to make sure these are covered in SDEV. Carmen invited the group to participate in the Student Engagement and Retention Retreat on June 29th.
After the students left, we continued to think about ways to help students focus on learning and not be so "GPA conscious". We talked about the idea that we learn best when we make mistakes -- that C's and B's are OK. It was pointed out that the scholarship application at PAC might be motivating students to drop courses when they are not getting A's -- there is a heavy advantage to having a 4.0 in the rating scale.
We compared the PAC approach to assessing General Education Competencies to the approach taken at some of our sister colleges. We are using a Backwards Design approach that is focused on collegiality and improvement.
We continued to look at drafts this meeting. Anna submitted some edits to the policy and I will update our file in the wiki. When I presented the "Faculty Acknowledgment Form" we had a discussion on its optional use that expanded to a discussion on how to help faculty with the deadlines -- some departments have sharepoint areas where files could be placed to help faculty. We are still thinking about this...
Another draft that we looked at was the worksheet to get faculty ideas for related action plans -- this is just an edit of the one we used last Spring at Faculty Development Day.
Finally, Patrick, Bailey, and I shared what we got out of the reading assignments. Patrick's reading was kind of depressing -- faculty laboring to assess writing skills with little to no support. Bailey shared insights from the reading on data access, and the value of leadership communications concerning assessment. I shared how the focus on learning is supported by assessment -- good stuff in Chapter 1 of Huba and Freed.