2018 Year-End Report and Draft Goals for the RAPs

A&S RAP – Faculty Learning Community Year-End Report 2017/2018

Our Faculty Learning Community goals at the start of the year included:

  • Building community and connections among faculty from all Arts and Sciences RAPs
  • Aligning individual RAP learning goals with the ARPAC learning goals
  • Developing appropriate assessment measures to determine if we are meeting these goals
  • Investigating evidence-based teaching and learning practices

By engaging in these activities, the current sense of rigor and teaching excellence in the RAPs has been strengthened, has become more cohesive, and will be collectively communicated and continuously cultivated in this community. While some of these goals have been met there is also more work to be done.

RAP Wide Proposed Goals

  • RAPs will foster, through individual attention, a sense of intellectual purpose that equips students to be active participants in the life of a major research university.

            Collectively, RAPs will:

  • Facilitate high school to college transition
  • Enable students to take initiative in their academic endeavors
  • Develop active learners who participate confidently in-class activities
  • Promote interdisciplinary thinking 

 

  • RAPs will enhance foundational academic skills through small classes, collaborative and applied learning opportunities uniquely available in residential learning communities.  

Faculty will encourage:

  • Creative thinking - Students understand the importance of original thought and interpretation. They will be able to develop and communicate their own informed analyses. 
  • Critical Thinking - Students evaluate both quantitative and qualitative data, demonstrate inductive and deductive reasoning and demonstrate the ability to make an argument from evidence 
  • Information literacy - Students can navigate complex information landscapes 
  • Communication skills - Students can present research, arguments in writing, and oral presentations 

 

  • RAPs will create inclusive communities and a sense of belonging by building early connections between students and faculty, staff, and peers through coordinated co-curricular and extracurricular activities. 

Students will feel: 

  • Sense of inclusion by being integrated into the campus community, including in their RAP community;
  • Sense of global citizenship and cross-cultural interconnectedness 
  • Encouraged to engage in deep experiential learning in order to develop strong leadership
  • Empowered to overcome feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety

 

 

Proposed Potential Metrics

Student exit survey questions: Our RAPs already use year-end surveys of students. We examined our surveys together in order to find the questions we have in common. We recognize that each RAP might wish to add additional questions, but we will propose that all A&S RAPs include ten common questions. The draft of these questions will be done after our last meeting this spring.

 

Faculty year-end reporting: We would like to recommend that faculty be asked to do a year-end report or questionnaire. We are proposing to create a menu of possible items that faculty could choose to report on. This could include more open-ended or qualitative measures as well as quantitative ones. The idea behind this reporting is both to assess how well we are reaching the stated goals above, and also to give faculty additional “multiple measures of teaching” that can be included for FRPA, merit pay reviews, and reappointment notebooks. We hope to soon have samples of ways this could be done as examples for individual RAPs to consider.

 

Making use of information already collected by the University: We would like to have a better sense of what data is already being collected, or could be collected, at the university level about our students. What information, in addition to retention rates, GPA, etc. is available to us and do we have the ability to gather any additional data once our students leave the RAP? We know this is an area the directors have already been working on and we believe that this information should be more widely discussed with RAP faculty. 

 

Final thoughts

The RAP-FLC goal of “building community and connections among faculty from all Arts and Sciences RAPs” has certainly been met this year. We learned much more about what we have in common across our RAPs institutionally and instructionally. A continued conversation about our pedagogical and programmatic goals is a must as the RAPs go forward.

We also discovered that our individual RAPs and RAP instructors already do many things that help to meet the proposed ARPAC goals. In the process of revising and restating these goals in our own words we have taken the opportunity to explore how different foci of our programs still provide us with much common ground.