for the Faculty and Staff of Washington State
University
from Provost Robert C. Bates
Number 8
February 2006
In my last Progress Report, I focused on the challenges and opportunities facing WSU in the next decade in the area of graduate education. This report will focus on undergraduate education.
The first goal of the WSU Strategic Plan is to "Offer the best undergraduate experience in a research university." Essential to this is ensuring that our efforts ultimately provide our students with an educational experience that prepares them for active and productive lives, effective relationships, and access to opportunities.
I want to provide an overview of steps that have been taken in support of our efforts to achieve this goal. These steps will help us address challenges identified with our undergraduate programs.
External Assessment of Undergraduate Education at Washington State University.
As part of ongoing assessment of undergraduate education at WSU, Dr. Robert Shoenberg from the SAGE Consulting Group (affiliated with the American Association of Colleges and Universities) visited WSU in the Fall of 2005 to evaluate undergraduate education practices as they relate to benchmarks for best undergraduate education practices nationally. I appreciate the time that university leaders, faculty, staff, and students took to meet with him. Your input was absolutely essential to Dr. Shoenberg and his important work.
His report and recommendations will be shared in the weeks ahead with the university community and I look forward to your feedback. I believe the report, coupled with dialogue across the university and resulting action steps to address the report's recommendations, will contribute to a climate supportive of innovation in undergraduate education and will foster faculty and staff participation in implementing strategies for change.
Dr. Shoenberg's report indicates that WSU already has many elements in place to provide a quality 21st century undergraduate experience. He points out that the foundation of such a program is embodied in our recently approved "Six Learning Goals of the Bacccalaureate." These learning goals are critical and creative thinking, quantitative and symbolic reasoning, information literacy, communication, self in society, and a specialty. These six goals spell out in concrete language the benefits and responsibilities of an undergraduate degree for students, faculty, and public alike. They set the stage for talking about how integral a strong undergraduate education is to a strong state economy and society as a whole. I greatly appreciate the work of the Teaching Academy and the Faculty Senate in advancing these goals.
The overall thrust of the report is the need for a renewed focus on the lower division experience, with an organizational structure to support ongoing improvement. This need was identified based upon some generally acknowledged institutional problems, including first-year students being considerably less actively engaged with their learning at WSU than at peer institutions and the fact that the dropout rate of students after the sophomore year is much higher than that of peer institutions.
The report also noted that first-year students encounter too many large courses with insufficient opportunity to engage actively in their learning and to develop skills of critical and creative thinking. While the report points out that WSU is poised to move ahead, it identifies a need for a focal point for strong leadership in undergraduate education to improve the quality of the overall undergraduate experience.
I believe our response to Dr. Shoenberg's report will become the next steps in implementing the undergraduate education goal of our strategic plan. I look forward to hearing your comments and ideas in response to the report, and working with you to make our stated vision for undergraduate education a reality.
Freshman Focus - Living and Learning
at Washington State University.
I want to thank all those who worked extremely hard over a short period of time to ensure Freshman Focus could be implemented beginning fall semester 2005. Initial feedback from surveys and focus groups conducted to date indicate the program is off to a very good start.
Freshman Focus is a collaborative effort between Academic and Student Affairs. The intent is to provide a living/learning experience for eligible entering freshman (fall semester only), per the strategic plan's recommendation to expand learning communities. As you may know, students are co-enrolled in two courses associated with their residence hall floor that satisfy General Education requirements. The purpose is to encourage significant engagement in academic work and discussion by students who attend same courses and live in close proximity to each other, encourage early development of friendships among students in a social context of shared academic interests, and create a greater sense of community by bringing living and learning together.
Over 70 percent of all entering freshmen participated in the Freshman Focus program. They joined another 11 percent of entering freshmen who chose to participate in other learning communities, such that over 80 percent of all entering freshmen participated in some form of a residential or curricular-based learning community.
Preliminary assessment findings include strong support from students. Students report that the program helped them make friends on the residence hall floor, and that those early friendships led to increased confidence in class. They study more than students surveyed over the past three years, form study groups, discuss ideas with friends outside class, and think about current events in relation to their course work. Not surprisingly, they also report higher levels of satisfaction with their academic experience. It appears the intense, compelling relationships established around the academic life of students have effectively helped make a big place small, and created a strong sense of academic community.
Of course there is still room for improvement. The full assessment report will highlight program goals, expected outcomes that have been achieved, and identify specific actions needed to improve the program. With Freshman Focus I am confident we have taken an important step in improving the quality of undergraduate education, particularly in the critical first-year experience of our students.
Dialogue with the Provost
The next Dialogue with the Provost is
Tuesday, February 14,
12 - 1, in the CUB Cascade Room. Overviews
and recommendations from the Shoenberg report on
undergraduate education and the Graduate Education
Commission and the Yardley Research Group reports on
graduate education will be presented as part of the
dialogue. Audience questions will be taken after the
presentation. I encourage you to attend and participate
in the discussion. A live videostream will be available
online. For that link see http://www.wsu.edu/dialogues-forums/
Online resources:
Office of the Provost
Archive of Past Provost's Dialogues
Robert C. Bates is Provost and Academic Vice President at WSU.