By Jason Cunningham
After a near month-long gap between Nov. 8’s faculty senate meeting Monday’s meeting, announcements were made including plans for several faculty holiday events, filing new grievances against salary cuts and the introduction of the new faculty senate meeting time.
The new meeting time is at 3:05 p.m. opposed to this semester’s 3:00 p.m. because of next semester’s new time block schedule. Changes made by the Curriculum Committee in minor class requirements and class structure changes across a broad variety of subjects and courses were also made.
The main course of Monday’s meeting came when Faculty Senate Vice President James Mulrooney called a vote to continue the use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized testing initiative for higher educational evaluation and assessment. The CLA is administered online and consists of open-ended questions that measure a student’s abilities in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and written communication skills.
“Our three year, sort of pilot study is over. So at this point we’re committing to the CLA….This is a long term commitment,” said Mulrooney.
According to Mulrooney, there’s no perfect test out there that would address the issues that would make every single department happy in terms of understanding how students lean.
“I think when you couple the CLA now with a lot of our own assessment efforts on campus and where we’re going with it; we really get a much better picture of how we teach our students,” said Mulrooney.
The motion’s goal was not only to continue administering the test, but to publish the results with a Voluntary System of Accountability report. According to its website, the VSA is an initiative by public four-year universities to supply basic, comparable information on the undergraduate student experience to important constituencies through a common web report known as the College Portrait. When the results will be published has yet to be determined.
“The actual design of the instrument itself is wonderful….The basic mechanism takes the SAT scores of our students, predicts how well somebody with that SAT score would do and then measures how well they do. And if they do better than their SAT score suggests, that is reported, or if they do less well than they’re SAT score suggests,” said Mary Anne Nunn, a member of the Ad Hoc Committee for General Education at CCSU.
It is unclear, however, how the exact scores provided by the CLA are completely measured.
“It is the first year this year that we have a group of seniors to take the test that also took it as freshman, and the test scoring is based on a cross sectional design. So this is a wonderful way to really validate that in our own heads….It is minimally difficult to administer, it costs us less than $8,000 a year to do several hundred students and I think it gives us an interesting measure. When we look at the value added for CCSU students compared to the expected value added, we’re above the line and that’s a very happy place to be,” said Nancy Hoffman, the Director of Institutional Research and Assessment for the Committee on Academic Advising 2010-11.
Participation in the CLA currently remains voluntary.
“No one is forced to take it at this point….It’s an innovation with encouragement and occasionally incentives, especially incentives for seniors…usually a raffle for some sort of technology they could be interested in owning, frankly, for the seniors. The freshman are more compliant,” said Hoffman.
The two-part motion was passed with five abstentions and no opposition.
The meeting wrapped up with a unanimously approved list for undergraduate and graduate graduation.
Monday’s meeting was the last of the semester. The meeting came a week earlier than traditional to the schedule to accommodate next week’s finals.