ASSESSMENT UPDATE

Through the State of New Mexico, Commission of Higher Education Research and Public Service Grant, the Assessment Resource Office will be preparing weekly bulletins that briefly highlight outcomes assessments results to the Eastern New Mexico University community.

The purpose of this weekly report is to stimulate campus conversation among faculty, administrators, and professional staff, to increase the use of existing data, and to inform the campus community on assessment issues.

This initial issue of the DataWave contains an update on academic outcomes assessment plans, the mission, goals, and objectives for the Assessment Resource Office, and a report by Dr. Bill Calton summarizing the graduation rates of students who participated in COMP exams. Future editions will report on student views, reasons for choosing ENMU, goals, typology and campus environment from the Cooperative Institutional Research Project (CIRP) freshmen survey, CAAP results, and other ENMU assessment results and activities.

Finally, it is hoped that this will be a forum for others to discuss their activities and results. If you have, or are conducting, research on how students learn, grow, and develop, please consider using the DataWave as a means for sharing your findings.

LATEST ON ACADEMIC PLANS

In September the Assessment Committee, in anticipation of submitting ENMU's academic outcomes assessment plans to NCA agreed that academic departments should have a draft of their plans to the assessment committee by December 1994. Frankly, we all swallowed hard and agreed that this needed to be done.

Reports from the College Deans and Dr. Mehaffy's office are that the vast majority of academic departments met the deadline! In addition to finalizing the plans for baccalaureate programs, departments must be aware that plans need to be developed for minors, and graduate programs.

Please feel free to call upon the Assessment Resource Office for assistance.

ASSESSMENT RESOURCE OFFICE

MISSION:

• The Assessment Resource Office intends to assist the University in becoming one of the premier comprehensive universities in student education in the Southwest by facilitating collaborative assessment among faculty and administration. In so doing, ENMU will be recognized as a regional and national leader in the field of outcomes assessment and student learning.

GOALS:

• To facilitate the study of students' patterns of learning and effective post secondary teaching.
• To add to the theory base of how students learn and develop, while emphasizing the implementation of more effective teaching strategies and student support programs at the University.

OBJECTIVES:

• To facilitate the development of an outcomes assessment plan for each academic major, the general education curriculum, student support programs, and overall university effectiveness.
• To coordinate the outcomes assessment plans developed by the various academic departments, administrative units, and student support areas into a collective whole for dissemination to the North Central Association.
• To report on the results of the University's assessment plans to the President, the Board of Regents, Vice-Presidents, Academic Deans, the University Assessment Committee, and the campus community.
• To conduct evaluation of existing data (CIRP, CAAP, COMP, FUS, student enrollment data) and prepare reports for the university community.
  

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PRELIMINARY REPORT ON GRADUATION RATES, NOVEMBER 1994
From Bill Calton, Professor of Mathematics at Eastern New Mexico University

Dean Caldwell provided release time, Spring, 1994, for me to look at results from the COMP test and attempt to provide data for our assessment efforts.

The tables were compiled by comparing the first semester freshmen students who took the COMP exams given in September of 1988, 1989, and 1990, with the Graduation Report given to the CHE for the years 90-91, 473 degrees; 91-92, 539 degrees; 92-93, 525 degrees; and 93-94, 566 degrees.