Westmont’s Program Review Committee

Minutes

Feb.6, 2014

Present:Dana Alexander, Dinora Cardoso, Barb Kennedy, Andrew Mullen, Tatiana Nazarenko, Michael Sommermann and Bill Wright

Barb Kennedy opened the meeting in prayer. Minutes from 1/9/14 and 1/22/14 were reviewed and corrected.

Recorded by Barb Kennedy

Tatiana Nazarenko reported that John Blondell presented the draft of Westmont Outcomes and Assessment Redesign to the Academic Senate. The Senate was receptive to the document although expressed some concern about the number of outcomes to assess. The GE Committee was given a mandate to continue the work. Tatiana also reported meeting with Student Life staff to review the above document. We need to consider the impact these changes might have on their assessment. As a result of the meeting, Student Life may take ownership of the GE Education Common Requirement – “Serving Society/Enacting Justice or Communicating Cross Culturally”. Since their division oversees programs involving vocations, internships, missionary assignments and volunteer activities, this might make sense.

Jennifer Taylor, our Director of Internships, has requested an extension date to Sept. 2015 for her 6 Year Report (presently due Sept.2014). She will likely be merging under the umbrella of Life Planning within the next few months and she is anxious about how this will impact her reporting. The Committee agreed to give her an extension for one year.

On Feb. 28th there will be a Dept. Chair meeting in which the PRC will discuss assessment of faith learning. Our members will need to present some examples of how faith learning could be assessed across the divisions. Sociology has been collecting data through their capstone course and have a good template. Dinora Cardoso and Michael Sommermann have both researched their departments. They have also approached other schools who teach integration of faith and learning. Of course, R.S. regularly addresses this and Philosophy has very good ideas about data collection. We have also found examples of department who looked at faith learning but their data was inconclusive. Optimally, lTatiana would like to have three presentations which include good descriptions and rubrics. After the presentations, there should be time for good discussion among the department chairs. She asked the members of the committee to keep her up-dated on their progress in finding examples to present.

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