STUDENT LEARNING ASSESSMENT PROGRAM
SUMMARY FORM AY 2008-2009
Degree and
Program Name:
Submitted By:
PART ONE
What are the learning objectives?(Highlighted text in red indicates change in assessment plan over previous years.) / How, where, and when are they assessed?
(Highlighted text in red indicates change in assessment plan over previous years.) / What are the expectations? / What are the results? / Committee/ person responsible? How are results shared?
1. Teacher Certification Candidates will, in their language of concentration, achieve a proficiency level of Advanced-Low in speaking, and listening as described in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. / Modified Oral Proficiency Interview administered once after completion of second year sequence. In addition,
during the last two semesters of study, an official ACTFL OPI will be administered by an ACTFL Certified Interviewer. Data will be collected and evaluated by Dept. Assessment Committee / ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (revised 1999).
See below. / Modified OPI administered to 4 Teacher Certification candidates at conclusion of 2202 – 1 French , 3 Spanish; there were no German candidates at this level.
Results:
Exceeds expectations: 3 (1 French, 2 Spanish)
Meets expectations: 1 (Spanish)
Does not meet: 0
8 official ACTFL OPI Advanced Low level checks were set up for candidates in their final year of study – 1 German, 7 Spanish. Of the 8 one student refused participation at time of interview.
Results:
Advanced-Low: 1
Intermediate-High: 6 / Interview after completion of second year sequence intended as diagnostic with intent of guiding students toward appropriate upper division courses (e.g. conversation and/or phonetics courses) geared to increase oral and listening proficiency.
Second interview conceived as means of indicating needs for curriculum revision. Review and revision responsibility of Dept. Assessment and Curriculum Committees.
2. Teacher Certification Candidates will, in their language of concentration, achieve a proficiency level of Intermediate-High in reading and writing. / Portfolio submitted containing writing samples in the language of concentration. Data collected and evaluated by the Dept. Assessment Committee. / ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (revised 1999). Candidates will document ability to sustain coherent written discourse on a chosen subject for at least 1000 words. / All samples represented work from upper division, writing intensive courses.: 1 – French; 0 – Spanish; 0 – German
Results:
Exceeds expectations: 1
Meets expectations: 0
Do not meet expectations: 0 / See above.
3. Teacher Certification Candidates will know manners, customs, and ranges of cultural expression including the literatures of those who speak their language of concentration. / Materials from courses on culture and literature as specified in Undergraduate Catalog will be incorporated into the student's portfolio / In addition to portfolio materials derived from class work, student will document having taken advantage of opportunities to connect with relevant language populations outside of classroom setting, e.g. extracurricular activities, study abroad, travel. / Culture Portfolio artifacts have still not been agreed upon. Reappraisal of Standards application is in process due to formulation of NCATE/ACTFL SPA report – see below
Study Abroad:
During the assessment period 6 Teacher Certification Candidates completed study abroad experiences:
France - 1
Germany - 1
Spain - 4 / See above.
4. A Teacher Cert. Candidate will demonstrate mastery of the principles of second language acquisition by developing competency in instructional planning, teaching methodologies and evaluation techniques / Teacher Certification Candidates will, during their final semester of course work, submit a separate Teaching Portfolio. Student Teaching. Portfolios submitted to the Dept Chair for approval to student teach. Selected portfolios evaluated by the Dept Assessment. Committee. / 8 portfolios were submitted in FA2006. All were deemed adequate to warrant approval to student teach. / See above.
5. Candidates will show adequate professional training by taking the ICTS subject matter knowledge test in French/German/Spanish. / As of SU2004 students are required to take and pass the Content Area Exam prior to Student Teaching. Data will be received by Department Chair and passed to Dept. Assessment Committee for evaluation. / A passing score on the exam will be determined by the ISBE. / In 2006-2007 results for 10 Content Area exams were reported -- 8 in Spanish, 1 French, 1 German. (The French candidate actually took the French and the Spanish exams and passed both.
Passed: 9 (1 French, 1 German, 7 Spanish)
Failed: 1 (Spanish) / Advisors and the Assessment Committee will continue to monitor results and implement remedial steps when necessary.
ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines
Advanced Low (New statement of expectation)
Speaking/Listening : Able to satisfy the requirements of everyday situations and routine school and work requirements. Can handle with confidence but not with facility complicated tasks and social situations, such as elaborating, complaining, and apologizing. Can narrate and describe with some details, linking sentences together smoothly. Can communicate facts and talk casually about topics of current public and personal interest, using general vocabulary. Shortcomings can often be smoothed over by communicative strategies, such as pause fillers, stalling devices, and different rates of speech. Circumlocution which arises from vocabulary or syntactic limitations very often is quite successful, though some groping for words may still be evident. The Advanced-level speaker can be understood without difficulty by native interlocutors.
Able to understand main ideas and most details of connected discourse on a variety of topics beyond the immediacy of the situation. Comprehension may be uneven due to a variety of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, among which topic familiarity is very prominent. These texts frequently involve description and narration in different time frames or aspects, such as present, past, habitual, or imperfective. Texts may include interviews, short lectures on familiar topics, and news items and reports primarily dealing with factual information. Listener is aware of cohesive devices but may not be able to use them to follow the sequence of thought in an oral text.
Intermediate High
Reading: Intermediate-High readers are able to read consistently with full understanding simple connected texts dealing with basic personal and social needs about which the reader has personal interest and/or knowledge. Can get some main ideas and information from texts at the next higher level featuring description and narration. Structural complexity may interfere with comprehension; for example, basic grammatical relations may be misinterpreted and temporal references may rely primarily on lexical items. Has some difficulty with the cohesive factors in discourse, such as matching pronouns with referents. While texts do not differ significantly from those at the Advanced level, comprehension is less consistent. May have to read material several times for understanding.
Writing: Able to meet most practical writing needs and limited social demands. Can take notes in some detail on familiar topics and respond in writing to personal questions. Can write simple letters, brief synopses and paraphrases, summaries of biographical data, work and school experience. In those languages relying primarily on content words and time expressions to express time, tense, or aspect, some precision is displayed; where tense and/or aspect is expressed through verbal inflection, forms are produced rather consistently, but not always accurately. An ability to describe and narrate in paragraphs is emerging. Rarely uses basic cohesive elements such as pronominal substitutions or synonyms in written discourse. Writing, though faulty, is generally comprehensible to natives used to the writing of non-natives.
PART TWO
During SU2008 we began formulation of our SPA report in anticipation of the 2009-2010 NCATE accreditation visit. Since 2004 when ISBE shifted our certification to k-12 and imposed new content area exams and standards, we have worked to meet those standards and have for the most part succeeded. However, recently the ISBE has shifted position and has begun requiring that we meet not only their standards but the standards imposed by the ACTFL through that organization’s status as the designated SPA for NCATE accreditation. Our submitted SPA report was not accepted in the initial round primarily because we had not previously imposed the ACTFL required Advanced-Low oral proficiency level for teacher candidates. We had chosen to impose the Intermediate-High standard previously required by the ISBE. It appears that we will have no choice but to impose the newly required standard in the future in spite of the fact that even ACTFL documentation indicates that attainment of this level is extremely difficult for students learning a second language in a traditional non-intensive classroom setting which does not include an extended (minimal 1 semester) immersion experience, for example, study abroad at the upper division. Our first round of official OPI data is clear evidence of this difficulty. The one candidate who attained the Advanced-Low rating was, in fact, a heritage Spanish speaker. Ironically, it should also be noted that one of the candidates who did not attain the rating was also a heritage speaker. Even more ironic is the fact that even though our candidates as a whole did not meet the ACTFL standard, they still had no trouble passing the required Illinois State Certification Content Area Test in all but one case and in all three languages represented in our program.
We will be spending 2009-2010 discussing how we will have to modify our existing curriculum to meet these challenges.
We are disappointed by the data we have been able to obtain concerning study abroad for teacher certification candidates. Teacher candidates represent nearly half of our majors but they have continued to represent the lowest proportional participation in study abroad. This is an issue that must be addressed as a significant advising issue especially in light of the projected difficulties we face with the imposition of Advanced Low speaking/listening standard by ACTFL/NCATE and by extension the ISBE.
AY2008-2009 is our fifth year since the shift to K-12 certification. We remain pleased that changes we have implemented in our program have continued to maintain a 90 to 100% pass rate on professional exams.
The greatest issue confronting both our assessment procedure and our Teacher Certification curriculum is determining how our experience with the ACTFL/NCATE report will influence the way in which we both deliver and assess our curriculum. These concerns go beyond the Teacher Certification Program in that they also will have repercussions for delivery and assessment of the curriculum of our regular major. IT is our intent to tackle these issues beginning in FA2009 with the intension of determining what the repercussions are for both programs and how we need to address them.
PART THREE
See above.
Our primary concern for our teacher certification candidates is the relatively low participation in study abroad as noted in Part Two. We need to do a much better job of advising students about the benefits both personal and professional of such experiences. We continue to discuss the feasibility of requiring a study abroad experience as an integral part of the major with Teacher Certification.