Brooke Kelly
Managing Editor
Next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, members of Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) will be at Jackson State University, evaluating how well Jackson State is preparing students for the future. Every 10 years, the university is evaluated for reaccreditation, and with new requirements from SACS, the university has been working to meet the organization’s standards.
SACS two new requirements are 1. Compliance certification and 2. Quality Enhancement Plans (QEPs)
According to the March QEP Newsletter, SACs wants to see universities have “a carefully designed course of action that addresses a well-defined and focused topic or issue related to student learning.”
Robert Blaine is director of the university’s new Quality Enhancement Plan, GEAR, which stands for Global Education through Analytical Reasoning. The process used to develop the QEP emerged from institutional assessment and included three concentrations: 1) Assessment of JSU’s strategic planning. 2) Relevance to the Mission, and 3) Assessment of the General Education core.
In creating JSU’s QEP, Blaine said, “We first examined the university’s mission. We tried to make sure everything we did fit the mission. “
GEAR was created after the QEP committee took ideas and suggestions from faculty, staff and students.
The QEP committee made the decision to focus on English skills, analytical reasoning, and global education after making conclusions based on of student pre and post CBASE scores in the analytical reasoning section, along with other data.
“Less than 2 percent of our students score high in the analytical reasoning section of the test,” said Blaine.
“What we have found is most of our general education courses don’t focus on analytical skills until the junior or senior year,” he continued.
Basically, GEAR will be carried out through a set of courses for first and second year students focusing on analytical reasoning in all disciplines.
Blaine said analytical skills are needed because they help students understand how information they learn is and can be applied to their lives and the lives of others.
“Say for example in a math class, studying algebra, students are to do an equation about rice production in India- how much rice is needed to feed the population….What’s more important than the math equation is how the equation can be used.”
The focus of GEAR is to better enable students to relate what they learn to some issue and draw inferences from what they learn.
Currently, as a whole, Blaine says, “that’s where [students] fall down. That’s what we’re trying to focus on.”
Last summer, faculty members went through a summer faculty development curriculum called GIFTS, Global Inquiry Faculty Teaching Seminar, which focused on teaching analytical reasoning skills through the context of global issues.
Teachers who went through GIFTS, taught UNIV 100 as the GEAR faculty, last semester. In the classes taught by GEAR instructors, 2 professors from 2 different disciplines, team taught the class through the faculty-developed text, Foundations in Global Inquiry, a text designed to increase student engagement, heighten awareness of global issues, increase communication skills, and foster the development of analytical thinking.
Students in these courses, were tested on analytical reasoning skills at the beginning and end of the semester, along with given other assessments.
Blaine stated that according to test results from these courses, the QEP committee saw a 16.25 percent increase from pre to post test in analytical reasoning.
Students, taking general education courses, can expect to see more from the GEAR program as the QEP committee makes plans to include the program’s objectives in other general education courses such as University Success 11/101/105, Math 111, Biology 1010-11/112, and Science 201.
The SACS representatives that will be visiting Jackson State are presidents and administrators from other universities across the nation. During their visit they will meet with everyone involved in creating the QEP, including a student focus committee. SACS will give feedback from their evaluation Wednesday.
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