2019 Year End Report and Student Learning Outcomes
A&S RAP – Faculty Learning Community Year-End Report 2018/2019
Our Faculty Learning Community goals at the start of the year included:
- Finalizing an A&S RAP-wide year-end student survey and doing a test run for feedback
- Having a RAP Teaching Forum meeting on RAP goals
- Creating another possible measure of student outcomes and feedback beyond the RAP exit survey
- Creating a more unified measure for RAP teaching
- Creating another programmatic (rather than individual RAP faculty) measure of success
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 Goals Stated as Student Learning Outcomes
Through participation in the RAPs, students will develop a sense of intellectual purpose that equips them to be active participants in the life of a major research university.
Students will:
- Understand the new expectations of college-level learning
- Take initiative in their academic endeavors
- Confidently and actively participate in class activities
- Develop interdisciplinary thinking
- Navigate complex information landscapes (information literacy)
- Develop skills that will enable them to work collaboratively as well as independently
Through participation in the RAPs, students will build early connections with faculty, staff, and peers.
- Students participate in co-curricular and extracurricular activities, building connections with others in their RAP community
- Students will feel a sense of inclusion by being integrated into the campus community including developing connections to, and an understanding of, the campus beyond their RAP community
- Students will develop a sense of global citizenship and cross-cultural interconnectedness
- Students will be empowered to overcome feelings of loneliness, isolation, and anxiety
Through participation in the RAPs, students will develop their creative thinking, critical analysis, and communication skills.
- Creative thinking - Students will understand the importance of original thought and interpretation. They will be able to develop and communicate their own informed analyses.
- Critical Analysis - Students will evaluate both quantitative and qualitative data, demonstrate inductive and deductive reasoning and demonstrate the ability to make an argument from evidence
- Communication skills - Students will be able to present research and arguments in writing and oral presentations
Proposed Metrics and Methods
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 is currently in circulation with RAP directors and will have a test run in Spring of 2019 with at least some of our RAPs.
Faculty year-end reporting: We have created a year-end faculty survey to be used as part of program, rather than individual faculty, review. We would like to test-run this survey with some of our faculty in Spring of 2019, and then run it with the A&S RAP faculty as a whole in AY 2019/2020. This survey would be given every two years to gather information for program review. The idea behind this reporting is both to assess how well our RAPs 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 should they choose to include this information for individual evaluation.
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.
Proposed Peer-Observation Protocol and Format for Observations: This spring, the RAP FLC acted as a Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) working group. We examined multiple ways of measuring how we are meeting the RAP goals and ways that this assessment might overlap with individual teaching assessment in our RAPs. We currently have a draft peer-observation protocol and a draft peer observation form that the group developed last semester. This form will be circulated among the RAP directors for input. Our goal is to have a test run of this protocol and form in Fall 2019 and to get feedback for improvement.
Final thoughts
The RAP-FLC goal of “building community and connections among faculty from all Arts and Sciences RAPs” has certainly been met again this year. We learned much more about what we have in common across our RAPs institutionally and instructionally and continued to develop a sense of what the RAPs have in common as a whole. We explored pedagogical interests related to our continued commitment to first-year college student education and we continued conversation about our programmatic goals. We remain committed to providing a quality experience for all our incoming first-year students at CU.
We would like to continue our work with TQF in order to discuss other measures of teaching, service, and professional development that could be used in our annual merit, reappointment, and promotions processes as well as their connection to program evaluation. Our work with TQF has put us in touch with what other CU departments/units are doing around the area of assessment and we are learning, and sharing, much by participation in this community of dedicated educators and scholars.