Developmental Education Committee

Meeting Minutes: March 7, 2005

Present: John Arola, Jim Berg, Rody Bowers-Hughes, Barb Cox, Sherry Dalager, Steve Dalager, Ann DeArmond, Kathy Grosh, Tracey Hammell, Terese Johnson, Joni Mathison, Georgia Robillard, Kristin Rust, Jeri Schwerin, Nancy Schumacher, Paula Young

1. New Student Assessment Task Force - Joni reported that the newly formed task force for the new student assessment program has had their first meeting. The task force helped rewrite the handout that is sent to students in their acceptance packet addressing the assessment test. Hopefully, the new wording will emphasize the importance of the placement test to students and parents, and it will also give students ways to prepare for the test.
   
   The task force also discussed how to best use Writeplacer, an essay option now available with ACCUPLACER. Steve Dalager took the essay exam and reported that it scored his essay similar to the way he would have scored it, grading content, as well as grammar and punctuation. There are 11 prompts available on the test, but it can be set to one prompt in order to use student essays to compare scoring and determine a cut score for advancement to the next writing level. A cut score would need to be set to identify students who need to complete the essay, as all students would not need to take the essay portion of the test, but only those scoring in a gray area between Fundamentals of Writing II and College Composition I.
2. Learning Communities - The Developmental Learning Communities for next year will have an identifying section number of 22, and a prefix of LRNG. Students will register for the 8 credit learning community and during the first week of classes, the classes will be split to show as a reading and a writing class on transcripts and grades. This should help alleviate problems with registering the same students for the cohorts. It was mentioned again the need to give faculty release credits to spend sufficient time really organizing and making connections between the classes.
3. Learning Communities Research and other developmental research - Ann has discussed tracking students from the learning communities and other developmental research with Sue Stenerson. Sue and Ann will meet after spring break to set up a control group and discuss how to best track students and determine their persistence in college. Paula will also join Ann and Sue in a meeting, as she was part of the original oversight and organization of the learning communities.
4. A+dvancer - Paula reported that the IE initiative for this program passed and that tests and lessons for 100 students will be bought with the IE money. Paula would like recommendations on how to proceed. She will make a connection with an area high school an perhaps 25 students could be identified from that school and then another 75 could be recommended to use the program who did not do well on their initial CPT test.
5. Advising and Counseling - Concerns were raised about the Last Date of Attendance policy. Several students who were dropped from courses due to lack of attendance are requesting to get back into the classes. Faculty will be hesitant to follow policy and put in last date of attendance if students are going to come back to them to be readmitted to the class. Tracey said she would bring faculty concerns back to the advisors. All agreed that that an FN is an FN, and students should not be sent to faculty for reentry to classes, but rather the student should go through the petition process.

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