2.12  

The institution has developed an acceptable Quality Enhancement Plan and demonstrates that the plan is part of an ongoing planning and evaluation process. (Quality Enhancement Plan)

RATIONALE FOR COMPLIANCE JUDGMENT

Project Abstract

To improve student learning across campus and, specifically, to address the issues raised by faculty, students,  staff, and employers, Nashville State Technical Community College (NSCC) has chosen to focus its efforts on Improving Students’ Critical Thinking.

The plan addresses the four components of student learning: knowledge, skills, behaviors, and values.  By enhancing students’ critical thinking skills across campus, students will be able to do the following:

• understand what critical thinking means (Knowledge)

• develop and apply better critical thinking skills (Skills)

• take responsibility for their own thinking and decisions (Behaviors)

• make sound decisions that demonstrate good thinking (Values)

Specifically, the mission of the Quality Enhancement Plan is:

Nashville State Technical Community College seeks to enhance critical thinking skills in student learning campuswide so that Nashville State students are better able to make confident, sound decisions in the classroom, about their education, and throughout their lives.

NSCC intends to accomplish this mission through the following broad student learning objectives:

Student Learning Objective 1—Campus Environment

The campus will create a shared vocabulary about critical thinking so that students, from the moment they come onto campus, are introduced to what these essential skills are and what critical thinking means. This shared vocabulary will emphasize the four broad categories of Critical Thinking most fundamental to sound decisions: Analysis, Evaluation, Inference, and Deduction [1].

Student Learning Objective 2—Faculty Professional Development

Through a series of projects under this objective, faculty will improve their teaching and assessment skills when it comes to the Critical Thinking skills of Analysis, Evaluation, Inference, and Deduction. Improving instruction and assessment—the goal of professional development—should correspond directly to improved student learning -- students’ understanding about what critical thinking is (knowledge) and developing and applying better critical thinking skills (skills).

 Student Learning Objective 3—Critical Thinking in the Curriculum

Through three phases, moving from a pilot course in each academic division to all General Education Core courses and then to every program on campus, this objective seeks to make Critical Thinking—specifically, Analysis, Evaluation, Inference, and Deduction—explicit and measured components of students’ courses campuswide. As a result, student learning should improve.  Knowledge about the thinking process, as well as course content, should deepen because students are not only memorizing data, but are also actively putting it in context. Skills should improve as students overtly develop and apply better thinking. An emphasis on increasing student knowledge and understanding about critical thinking and on explicitly requiring students to exhibit critical thinking in the course should also result in changed behaviors and values. Students who think better should take responsibility for their thinking and decisions, and should make more sound decisions.

 Student Learning Objective 4—Education & Career Matrix

Because the focus encompasses more than student advancement in coursework, this objective is designed to address weaknesses perceived in the advising and registration process. Although faculty advise students about their course of study, part of student learning includes students’ taking greater responsibility for their own educational and career planning and decisions. The project attached to this objective is to design a matrix with a series of questions that will help students think through their career goals and therefore make informed decisions about their course of study.

Topic Selection Process

In the fall of 2004, Nashville State Technical Community College began its preliminary work on the QEP.  During the pre-semester faculty convocation, Dr. Ellen Weed, Vice President of Academic Affairs and Ted Washington, Associate Vice President for Institutional Research, presented several in-service sessions on SACS and QEP.  One major objective of these sessions was to explain the purpose, process and importance of developing a QEP. The sessions stressed that the QEP should focus on a topic that the entire campus found meaningful and that would improve student learning. 

During September, the SACS subcommittee from the Assessment and Planning Council was charged with coordinating the campus effort to choose a topic. This committee emailed the entire campus with the QEP requirements and a proposal form [2], and asked for topics that faculty and staff members thought would improve the educational effectiveness of  NSCC.  Meetings were also held with employee representative groups and academic divisions. Thirty-seven topics were submitted, and the committee chose four for further discussion:

·        Improving students’ critical thinking ability.

·        Improving students’ ethical reasoning ability.

·        Improving students’ information literacy.

·        Writing across the curriculum.

The committee sent a description of the four topics to the entire campus and asked for further feedback and preferences. The committee then summarized the advantages and disadvantages listed by faculty and staff and sent the results to the entire campus. Based on the comments they received as well as their own analysis of the NSCC campus culture, the SACS subcommittee recommended Critical Thinking to the Assessment and Planning Council and to the Vice President of Academic Affairs. President George Van Allen and the College Executive Committee gave the topic final approval, thus formalizing Improving Students’ Critical Thinking Skills as NSCC’s QEP topic in November 2004.

Topic Selection Rationale

There were several reasons that critical thinking became the QEP for NSCC:

1.      Historically, the College’s mission as a technical institute emphasized employment skills such as critical thinking. Even as a community college, 75% of degrees awarded in 2004-05 were A.A.S. degrees.

2.      Critical thinking is one of the designated outcomes of the General Education core [3].

3.      Advisory committees in the business, engineering technology, and information technologies areas consistently state that graduates need to be stronger in their problem-solving skills and need to strengthen their ability to translate their “school learning” to workplace situations.

4.      In department meetings, faculty members often discuss the inability of students to synthesize information effectively or to transfer skills to subsequent courses.

5.      There is also a good foundation of NSCC students’ critical thinking ability on which to base the QEP.  NSCC has used the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) as a required exit test for all degree graduates since 2000, thus giving the College several years of student outcomes information to analyze and use as a basis for future assessments.

6.      NSCC has received NSF grants to develop courses in the Engineering and Information Technology programs around a real-world case-study approach.  These faculty members are rethinking their approach to curriculum and requiring students to focus on the thinking skills that will provide the best workable solutions for their cases [4].

7.      Critical thinking instruction corresponds with the college’s strategic plan for 2005-2010, especially those objectives under Goal 3 Quality:

·        Objective 3.1. Effective Programs/Services: As areas conduct academic audits, the findings will help steer the QEP into the activities that will most benefit students and programs

.        Objective 3.2.2. Faculty Recruitment—Professional Development accountability: One of the goals of the QEP is to provide campus-wide education on ways to increase students’ critical thinking skills. Since this is one area that faculty often identify as a weakness in students, this should provide a clear benefit to faculty’s professional development.

·       

      Objective 3.4.1-3.4.3. Peer comparisons: As our students become stronger in their critical thinking skills, they should be more successful when they transfer to universities and enter the workplace. They also should rate their satisfaction with the college more positively if they are more successful after graduation [5].

Improving the critical thinking skills of students at Nashville State Technical Community College is an appropriate strategic goal for the college, one that is closely related to its historic mission as a technical institute and its current mission as a comprehensive community college.  It will require broad commitment throughout the instructional divisions.  In addition, a focus on critical thinking will serve NSCC students and the Nashville community well.  The typical NSCC student is older, academically weaker, and more likely to be an employed part-time student than the typical community college students.  The college has significant minority and refugee populations.  A campus-wide focus on improving their abilities to analyze, to evaluate, and to make inferences will benefit all of these individuals as they move forward into careers and/or strive for baccalaureate degrees.