Status of CTC’s Quality Enhancement Plan - Spring 2010

Creating a Culture that Focuses

on Enhancing Student Learning

In the nearly five years since CTC developed its QE Plan, instructional and student services units have used the QEP cycle in various ways to improve on student success in their educational and student support programs. Our QEP was a decentralized plan, with instructional units conducting annual experiments in teaching, and service units analyzing their operations and student support to improve outcomes. The Plan had identified two areas of focus:

•  instructional unit initiatives would directly impact student learning, concentrating on early and frequent feedback for students, and

•  student services units would strive to remove barriers and enhance opportunities.

The QEP was outcomes-oriented, using an iterative research process including defining problems and expected outcomes, developing interventions, assessing and analyzing results, and making evidence-based decisions for further improvement. The two areas of focus, Instructional and Support Services, concentrated on their separate themes.

CTC Instructional units planned to assess students' work earlier in their courses to activate the feedback loop in a more timely way, enabling students to adjust their studies and instructors to adapt their teaching. To do this, instructional departments strengthened their formative assessments of student learning, particularly in the early weeks of class.

Each Instructional unit would specify its own priorities for improvement within the issue of Instructional Feedback, establish baseline measures, define standards of what constitutes improvement of student learning in their field or in selected courses, develop interventions and test their effectiveness, and discuss and report results on which to base further instructional and curricular decisions (EBDs – evidence-based decisions). Successful strategies would be nurtured and unsuccessful ones would be examined and revised or discarded. The Instructional units used feedback loops to incorporate necessary changes to teaching, learning, and the curriculum as an ongoing process.

QEP’s impact on student learning – Instructional goals and outcomes

•  The impact of our unit’s QEP initiative over the last four years is one of consciousness-raising for instructional faculty.

•  QEP initiatives have given us an increased awareness of the needs of our students.

•  The impact of the QEP will get better as time goes on.

These remarks are from an impact summary survey of instructional department chairs and QEP specialists, and support a claim of successful progress in Creating a Culture that Focuses on Enhancing Student Learning. As one veteran department chair wrote,

•  Faculty are more aware of the need for monitoring and promoting student success, students are more focused on specific skill sets in the various disciplines, the assessments have resulted in increased communication between students and faculty, and increased faculty feedback has resulted in improved student understanding and performance.

The Plan’s primary goal was to improve processes that support . . . assessment in order to improve the quality of student learning . Faculty professionalism in using the tools of educational research for more sophisticated assessment and instructional design evolved over the course of the QEP initiatives. Faculty suggestions from the summary survey include ‘we should’ statements that reveal that many have embraced the utility of these strategies.

Instructional units varied in their approach to setting priorities and methods for improvement within the general theme of instructional feedback. We can summarize the initiatives under six basic types:

•  general learning outcomes,

•  specific learning outcomes,

•  content support,

•  learning support,

•  application/synthesis, and

•  needs/satisfaction.

•  Under ‘general learning outcomes,’ five units aimed to have more students fulfill the broad course and program goals.

•  Under ‘specific learning outcomes,’ four units tracked student achievement through improvement on a specific checklist of items, working within the instructional setting.

•  In ‘content support,’ one unit provided additional learning experiences outside required class assignments, as its intervention for weaker students.

•  In ‘learning support,’ six units either provided tutoring or referred students to Project PASS, CTC’s tutoring service.

•  In ‘application/synthesis,’ three units asked students to draw together several facets of their program to develop a personalized product or solve novel problems.

•  And in ‘needs/satisfaction,’ students were asked to evaluate their experiences.

These selections made sense for the disciplines and faculty implementing them, and after four years, we have the following responses from 24 department chairs or QEP specialists:

Instructional units’ assessment of learning outcomes included

•  pre/post testing (7),

•  embedded assignments and item analysis,

•  reduced fails/increased pass,

•  rubrics and portfolios, and

•  national exams/mastery criteria,

with some units using combinations. Faculty continue to progress in refining assessment tools for analytic purposes, with increased interest in using the stated learning outcomes as practical checklists for determining student progress and mastery. As we go forward, the groundwork established by these indigenous QEP initiatives will form the basis for the next round of program review and upgrade.

Key Project – the Student Success Course

In the review conducted after the first two years of the QEP, two additional needs were identified: student writing skills and college preparedness and study skills.

A group of faculty, college leaders, and key staff convened to identify the essential learning outcomes and develop a course proposal, syllabus, and resources. The author of a textbook eventually adopted conducted two on-campus seminars on the objectives, content, and student learning experiences for the course.

PSYC 1300 – Learning Frameworks (3 credit-hours), was piloted in Fall 2008 and enrollment has continued to grow. Student feedback is uniformly positive, with longitudinal follow-up still to be developed. Of the initial 22 completers, one has since received a bachelor’s degree and 20 re-enrolled with CTC for a following semester -- a 95.4% retention/completion rate. Advisors encourage at-risk students to elect the course during their first term in college and one program requires it for new students.

Using Data to Drive Improvements

A May 2009 Faculty QEP Outcomes survey queried the faculty on the impacts of their QEP projects and QEP in general. Faculty selected these statements:

Based on responses to a parallel set of statements, these answers revealed a slight continuing gap between their expectations for the projects and the reality of performance. However three questions that directly addressed the QEP goals showed improvement:

This reveals a growing culture of conscious, evidence-based enhancement of student learning, the primary goal of CTC’s QEP. Asked how they would characterize our QEP’s impact on student learning, fifty-seven faculty provided a variety of detailed comments, both about the experiences of the project and about how we can proceed in the future. A prior survey, the Inventory of Faculty Assessment Practices, also revealed faculty uses of a variety of teaching, assessment and evaluation methods enabling students to demonstrate levels of learning.

Faculty Development

Faculty have become involved in assessment development through attending the SACS Summer Institute on Quality Enhancement and Accreditation and bringing its knowledge and perspectives to share in internal forums. Recent work also includes developing a rubric for assessing writing across the curriculum to track General Education program outcomes, and participation in THECB accountability discussions, contributing applications perspectives to the process.

From the perspective of the Director of Learning Outcomes Assessment, the future for greater faculty leadership in guiding and tracking student achievement is bright. As faculty receive feedback from these studies, surveys, and other institutional data, they become more involved in recognizing trends and more interested in proactive discussions within their instructional areas.

QEP’s impact on enhancing opportunity – Support Services Initiatives

CTC support services units identified specific unit initiatives under the Service Excellence theme.  Their goals were to remove barriers, enhancing opportunities for students to enroll, progress in, and complete their educational programs.

Leaders and key staff also met collectively to develop college-wide initiatives for better communications, for training in service excellence, and for working with diverse student needs. An early initiative to Eliminate the Runaround developed The ABCs of CTC to help staffers make sure callers were forwarded to the right resource on the first try.

Within units their initiatives covered process analysis, work flow, cross-training, and updating professional skills to stay current with new technology and enable CTC to offer the newer, more sophisticated services to students enabled by prospect management.

Nineteen units within Central Campus, the Fort Hood and Service Area Campus, and twelve Continental Campus sites reported on the QEP Summary Survey during summer 2009. As with the instructional units, their internal initiatives varied.  The survey cites the following improvements:

Noteworthy among the Support Services projects is the Annual Service Excellence Conference, developed in-house and attended by more than 120 staff members annually. Perennially popular sessions are repeated each year for new attendees, with others developed according to interests and needs assessments. These conferences have increased understanding among the units and nurtured a more collegial team of campus administrators and staffers. The Excellence efforts have streamlined many processes for students, creating an environment conducive to persistence and achievement of educational goals.

In surveying the support units of the college, we see the effects on all CTC campuses.

In addition,

•  77% of Support Services unit leaders “believe that involvement in the QEP initiative / IE Goal helps staff collaborate on providing excellent service,” and

•  80% “believe that involvement in the QEP initiative / IE Goal helps individual staff focus on solving problems in a systematic way.”

Data on enhancement of student learning and access is difficult to attribute directly to QEP, or to any other particular event, characteristic, or change. However the awareness, evaluation procedures, initiatives and events have clearly developed the processes for organizational improvement within CTC. The increased communication has also cross-fertilized ideas: faculty have begun offering a track in the Excellence Conference and plan to do the same in the staff-initiated Diversity Conference to address student learning attributes and issues.

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