In this document:
CSULB is committed to “graduating students with highly valued degrees.” By this phrase we signal our commitment to awarding degrees that are the result of rich and deep student learning and our commitment to successfully retain and graduate students in a timely manner. We want to be able to demonstrate the quality of the degrees we award, and we want CSULB degrees to be highly valued by faculty, staff, students, parents, employers, graduate schools, the public, accreditation officers, and the legislature. Because the high value of our degrees will be rooted in the success of our graduates, we must sustain a commitment to student success broadly defined: at one and the same time, the university actively promotes student persistence to timely graduation, and it uses evidence of student learning to continuously improve curricula, instruction, and student engagement in learning. Our graduation rates have improved markedly in the past decade. However, even with this improvement, campus rates are about average relative to available comparison institutions (i.e., other CSU campuses, other public comprehensive universities, and other institutions that spend similar amounts per student). CSULB aims to be among the top performers in these comparison groups. In addition, CSULB wishes to ensure that success in these indicators includes gender and ethnic subgroups.
We have identified a set of current challenges to study regarding the quality of our programs and how this relates to student retention and graduation.
We would like to increase the campus’ awareness and use of graduation rate data. The campus has made a fairly dramatic improvement in graduation rates over the past decade: about 17%.
That improvement can probably be attributed to changes made in the late 1990s to improve class availability, strengthen first year programs, and systematize first year advising. The starting point for our improvement was a very low point in the wake of the budget crisis of the early 1990s and, even with improvement, the current six-year freshman cohort graduation rates are about average relative to available comparisons (i.e., other CSU campuses, other public comprehensive universities, and other institutions that spend similar amounts per student). CSULB would like to be among the top performers in these comparisons. CSULB also wishes to ensure that success on these indicators includes gender and ethnic subgroups. Most faculty, department chairs, and other academic leaders have little awareness of past or current CSULB performance in terms of graduation rates. In addition to increasing campus awareness of this problem, we need to study how the university uses information about trends in campus-, college-, and department-level retention and graduation rates to inform changes aimed at improving student success. (Criterion 2.10)
Each year, a significant number of students who apply to graduate are denied. Graduation problems seem to arise from the interaction of several of CSULB’s characteristics: a large, mainly commuter student population, uneven access to a decentralized advising system, and complex curricular requirements. These elements create the risk that students will not fully understand and complete degree requirements. This set of issues is a central, knotty problem for our campus. An academic advising project known as “Graduation Greenlight” has been created to help students resolve these problems; it has accumulated a trove of information that can help us understand where the problems lie. We need to assess the success of this initiative. We will address two of these problems separately:
In our curriculum, there are identifiable courses in which high percentages of students regularly receive D, F, or W grades. While there is an awareness of these persistently high failure rates, the campus lacks a systematic process to discover the reasons for failure and improve student performance. When provided with information about persistently high failure rates, there is a tendency for interpretations to reflect one of two perspectives: one perspective emphasizes student motivation, ability, preparation, or work ethic, while the other emphasizes instruction that does not successfully engage students, such as large class size or impersonal lecture format. Both perspectives reflect potentially important issues that could be examined in high failure rate situations. We need to ensure that the causes for student failure are both understood and addressed.
Writing is a key ability that affects academic performance in many areas and about which many faculty members are concerned. On a highly diverse campus like CSULB, second language issues are very important, and many students struggle with the system-wide Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR). The Academic Senate recently adopted and implemented a new Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement Policy designed to reduce the number of students who fail our Graduation Writing Proficiency Examination and who, as a result, cannot graduate. We will assess the success of the new policy’s implementation. (Criterion 2.3)
CSULB has several characteristics that make effective student advising difficult to ensure. The large, mainly commuter student population includes a number of freshmen who arrive without declaring a major. The campus has a diverse set of arts and sciences and professional academic programs, each with distinct requirements. Academic advising services are decentralized. Responsibility for General Education advising is provided by the Academic Advising Center but advising for major requirements is provided by academic colleges and departments. Academic colleges and departments have adopted different advising models including advising by one or two designated faculty in a department (e.g., most Arts and Liberal Arts departments),advising by all faculty in a department (e.g., Journalism), advising by student peers with training and supervision (e.g., Psychology), and advising by staff organized at the college level (e.g., Business). In addition, a number of special programs provide advising to their students (e.g.,Learning Alliance, President's Scholars, and Educational Opportunities Program).
CSULB academic requirements are complex and the learning curve of new advisors is recognized to be very steep. Few faculty members attempt to provide General Education advising because those requirements are seen as very complex. Faculty workload due to expectations for teaching, scholarship and service is very high and the time-consuming work of advising is not highly recognized or rewarded for faculty. These complexities are likely behind recent student survey results that identified advising as a key area in need of improvement on the CSULB campus.
All degree programs at CSULB are implementing a faculty-endorsed time line for the assessment of student learning outcomes, with reports provided annually to deans and central academic administrators. Beginning in 2005-06, a plan for or an update of student learning assessment is a required component of all periodic program review. Each college has designated a coordinator responsible for ensuring the assessment of program and course learning outcomes, with funding allocated to support faculty efforts. The Director for Assessment and Program Review, together with the college assessment coordinators, will review the departmental annual assessment reports to document how programs have made changes based on evidence of student learning. These reports will then become part of each program’s review. We need to assess how readily programs make curricular and instructional changes based on actual evidence of student learning. (Criteria 2.7, 2-10)
A particular effort has been made for our General Education program. The CSULB GE policy identifies ten key learning outcomes and defines guidelines for ongoing program-level assessment. For each of these ten learning outcomes, the responsible faculty come together to identify current pedagogical practices and to examine their effectiveness for student learning. The goal is for faculty to create common pedagogical practices, incorporate them in a variety of courses, assess their impact on learning, and tease out best practices to benefit all GE courses. Faculty who teach GE courses will collectively examine samples of student work to map desired learning outcomes to specific elements of instructional activities. The best practices identified through this ongoing plan will inform the evaluation and recertification of General Education courses.
Only through making student learning outcomes assessment a regular part of the instructional routine can we truly gauge our students’ successes. Yet, there are many demands upon our faculty’s time and attention, and assessment is often seen as one more task added to an overfull plate. In order to encourage faculty to adopt a “culture of student success”, we need to identify best practices in assessment used at other institutions that can be incorporated into our existing faculty workload. Although preliminary results will be available for incorporation into the Capacity and Preparatory Review, very substantial results will be addressed in the Educational Effectiveness Review. (Criterion 2.10)
Student learning occurs in the context of students’ lives that comprise experiences inside and outside the classroom. The University offers a wide range of co-curricular programs and support services outside the classroom that are designed to enhance university retention and graduation efforts. Academic Affairs and Student Services work closely to provide developmental activities that promote health and wellness while supporting the personal, intellectual, and social growth of our students. Specifically the intended learning outcomes of the co-curricular programs and support services coincide with some of the intended learning outcomes of general education: communication, critical thinking, interpersonal skills, self-understanding, and problem solving. Despite these similarities, like most universities, we have made little effort to articulate either the conceptual connections or the degree to which the co-curricular programs and support services help develop these skills. We propose to use the WASC process to examine the effectiveness of these connections in promoting student learning.
Various surveys and reports often indicate that there are key areas in which employers find college graduates lacking, especially in areas of written and oral communication, working in a diverse environment, and working in teams. Further, we need to learn how well we have prepared our students for graduate school in order to modify our academic programs accordingly. Like most universities, we have little hard evidence that helps us to understand the adequacy of our preparation for students in these areas. We need to learn how our students’ skills in these areas compare to external expectations. (Criterion 4.8)
Following are the questions we propose to study in our Capacity Review. With each of these questions, our focus will be upon examining the processes and organizational structures that underlie our capacity to be effective.
Following are the questions we propose to study in our Educational Effectiveness Review. With each of these questions, our focus will be upon examining the results of our efforts with respect to each of the issues that we examined in the Capacity Review.
As a result of examining these issues, we expect to attain several results. We expect to foster a campus-wide commitment to student success. We expect an increase in our retention and graduation rates. We expect an increase in student success in current high failure rate courses and an alleviation of common academic problems preventing graduation. We expect widespread use of learning outcomes data by colleges and departments, as well as in General Education, to shape curricular and instructional innovation and thus improve student success. We expect to better integrate student learning outcomes in our programs and services outside the classroom. Finally, we expect modifications to our academic programs based on the perceptions of our graduates by both employers and graduate schools.
