2019 Public Summary
Athletic Training*
Bethel College voluntarily withdraws accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education for the Bachelor of Science in Athletic Training. Students who entered this program for the Fall 2018 semester made up the last cohort to enter the program at Bethel College. The program will close following the graduation of the last students who have already enrolled. The Bethel College Athletic Training Program is currently on probation by the Commission on Accreditation of Athletic Training Education (CAATE), 6850 Austin Center Blvd., Suite 100, Austin, TX 78731-3101. The program has withdrawn its voluntary CAATE accreditation, effective June 1, 2021. The program will remain on probation until the withdrawal is effective and the program is closed.
Bible and Religion
One student graduated in 2018-19 with a double major in Bible and Religion and Communication Arts. With the retirement of the one full-time faculty person in the department after this year, the coming year is one of staff transition and the naming of a replacement. Most of the BRL department teaching continues to focus on students taking our courses to meet requirements in the common core of our General Education program.
Biology
Most (nearly 100%) of Bethel graduates with biology majors or natural sciences majors with considerable coursework in biology enjoy success in graduate school admissions, entry into medical and other health science programs, and employment related to their academic discipline. We have made some changes in the department to help more students succeed (e.g., working closely with the Center for Academic Development to assist with specific courses, an advising program that addresses the varied needs of a diverse student body, the RICHE program to support summer internships and job shadowing). We have implemented steps to improve the senior research and the resultant thesis by intervening more frequently as projects develop and the capstone paper is being written, including identifying distinct milestones for each semester.
Business
Bethel College’s bachelor of science degree in business administration is designed to expose students to skill sets in high demand for business, nonprofits, and civic organizations. Combined with a commitment to experiential learning, Bethel business students have opportunities to engage with outside speakers, work on real-world problems with local businesses and gain valuable experience in teamwork. While the primary mission of Bethel’s business faculty is teaching, faculty recognize the importance of keeping abreast of current developments in their fields through research, consulting, speaking, and service activities. The Business department is eager to integrate and leverage the strengths of our new management hire. We believe this to be a positive addition to our department. Bethel continues to offer more Accounting courses than any other ACCK school, thus better preparing students interested in this career area for the CPA exam. Business faculty engage in ongoing continuing education; some are sought after for national speaking engagements. Currently, the Business department at Bethel College is led by three women. Recent AAUW reports suggest that females account for 20- 30% of full-time faculty in business programs across the nation. It is our pleasure to be outliers in this group. The number of students entering Bethel College who identify business as their major continues to increase steadily. At the same time, a growing divide is evident between well-prepared, academically gifted students and those who enter the program less prepared and unable to complete college-level academic tasks successfully. The department is encouraged to see additional support services in place for underprepared students and the hire of athletic coaches who value the whole person. Most business majors enroll in an external internship during their senior year. During the 2018-2019 academic year, 21 students completed experiential learning opportunities at for-profit and not-for-profit businesses in Newton and the surrounding area. Internship foci included accounting, marketing, graphic design, and small business management. Bethel College business majors who participated in an internship experience continued to score in the “excellent” range on the following personal competencies: professional attitude, enthusiasm, teamwork, initiative, and dependability. Bethel College business majors who participated in an internship experience continued to score in the “excellent” range on the following professional competencies: academic preparation, communication, critical thinking and leadership.
Chemistry
Students taking chemistry courses at Bethel College generally perform better than the 50th percentile on the American Chemical Society exam, meaning their knowledge and conceptual understanding are better than that obtained by students in equivalent classes nationwide. For areas in which we failed to meet this objective, we will revise our assignments, lecture materials, and class activities to help students better master the material. Chemistry students are also actively engaged in research projects. Many of our chemistry students present their research findings at the annual URICA Symposium and local and national chemical conferences, such as the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society and PittCon. Finally, we have placed most of our graduates over the past five years into the workforce, a professional school (medical, dental, veterinarian), or graduate school within the first year (often sooner) following graduation from Bethel College. This success has been achieved by ensuring that our students graduate knowing how to use most scientific instrumentation and the skills to be critical thinkers.
Communication Arts
Departmental assessment data suggests that student achievement continues the trajectory of improvement noted in the 2017-18 report. Students approached, met, or exceeded assessment benchmarks. They maintained confidence and competence in public presentation and improved academic writing competency (Goals I and II). While students’ ability to articulate meaningful connections among historical, theoretical, and practical implications of communication processes (Goal III) was roughly comparable to the previous year, the absence of reported data in the Persuasion and Argumentation course may have compromised the scores. Demographic data for 2019 graduates shows that, like the class of 2018, our students entered Bethel with stronger academic preparation than in previous years, which likely contributes to continued improvement in student performance. With the implementation of COA337 Communication Theory and Research Methods in the fall semester of 2019 (delayed until this fall due to faculty load demands), we anticipate majors will be better prepared for the research writing expectations in the Communication Arts Seminar.
Elementary Education
The new Kansas Elementary K-6 standards are broken into the functions of content, assessment, and instruction, including instructional strategies. Most of us in this department have always taught our content while at same time modeling and embedding teaching strategies and methods of assessment. The new standards will lead us to reflect on how well we are combining all of these attributes and with the use of the new Praxis Elementary Content Knowledge for Teaching (7801) Exam, we will soon be able to see how successful our teaching has been in combining the functions of content, assessment, and instruction including instructional strategies.
Health and Physical Education
The Health and Physical Education Department is moving away from the longstanding comprehensive exam as the primary data collection tool and instead working toward utilizing coursework with well-established grading tools to better assess whether students are meeting department objectives. The trend of a very high transfer population has made it difficult to collect reliable data, knowing that most students have not received the same instruction in all HPE coursework. In addition to this transition, the department recognizes that students are largely successful in understanding of the major’s content but weaker in modifying that content for learners who are different from themselves. One area of curricular improvement will be at looking for additional avenues to present material to different populations, including opportunities outside of the adaptive physical education course. The department would also like to see a continuation in the positive shift in the number of graduates that successfully complete the undergraduate research project. In the past few years, there have been a number of incompletes or failures in this course sequence. We hope that these students will be able to complete the course requirements in the near future. The department faculty has transitioned to requiring the project to be submitted incrementally throughout the year instead of allowing students to submit the entire project at the end of the year. This has improved outcomes and hopefully will continue to trend positively.
History and Conflict Studies
History major:
A strongly bifurcated cohort of students in this year’s history seminar class resulted in higher-than-usual achievement on the one hand and failure to meet one standard by one student on the other hand. In addition, we noted a second student who was a transfer missed only one component of goal 2, suggesting that spending more time in the program would help students meet all of the assessment goals.
History and Political Science major:
In the first year of the History and Political Science major completion, we found that defining an appropriate context for the research area was a struggle, indicating a need for better bibliographic preparation.
Mathematics
We assess our students based on our objectives related to computation skills and conceptual understandings in a variety of fundamental and advanced areas; effective oral presentation of mathematical concepts; ability to write mathematical documents using LATEX; ability to successfully integrate and apply their mathematical knowledge in an area of research for their senior seminar project; and knowledge of significant persons, events, and developments in the history of mathematics, including knowledge of non-western mathematics. Our assessment instruments range from proof-writing and course-specific exams to senior seminar research and presentation and the ETS Major Field Test in Mathematics. Students’ performance on the ETS Major Field Test in Mathematics has remained comparable to that of previous years and recent performance of students on their seminar projects slightly exceeded expectations of the mathematics faculty.
Music
The Music Department continues to meet our established goals for our graduates. Our graduates continue to score quite high on comprehensive exams compared to music graduates from across the country. In addition, our graduates are accepted into graduate programs without having to take remedial coursework to qualify for those positions. However, we believe we can do better at integrating theory, history and aural skills into the entire fabric of our curriculum. To that end, the music department will evaluate our delivery of theory and aural skills to explore the possibilities of changing how that information is delivered and how it can be more tightly integrated into all aspects of the program.
Nursing
The Department of Nursing completed a five-year refinement and data collection cycle for the holistic admissions process. Holistic admissions evaluate applicants not solely on traditional admission criteria but on multiple components that reflect an applicant’s academic readiness, potential academic success, and success on the nursing licensing exam. The quality improvement process allows the department to continually work to improve student retention and NCLEX pass rates as an element of accreditation. In addition, the Department of Nursing continues to monitor student performance on the NCLEX-RN exam as well as program-identified student outcomes to ensure the program continues to meet approval requirements by the Kansas State Board of Nursing and accreditation requirements by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE). During the Fall 2019 semester, the program will submit a midterm Continuous Improvement Progress Report (CIRP) to CCNE to demonstrate continued compliance with the accreditation standards and ongoing program improvement as part of the program re-approval granted in 2014 through 2024.
Psychology
We will use our current goals and corresponding objectives to assess departmental outcomes. However, we will likely change some curricular aspects that could affect the outcomes in the next report, which will be adjusted if needed. Due to departmental faculty changes for both faculty lines, several curricular and assessment changes are likely in the next 1-2 years. We may also adjust assessment goals based on changes to the standardized ETS Psychology Area Exam in the future. Lastly, we are convinced that student growth and progress is holistic rather than discrete, and changing student demographics at the college may warrant consideration of other types of assessment instruments or learning outcomes in the coming years (e.g., more specific work-related outcome assessment).
Social Work
The Bethel College Social Work Program has been fully accredited by the Council on Social Work Education since 1974. In February of 2019, the Program received reaffirmation of accreditation for the full eight years with no concerns. Annual internal assessments indicate that all nine competencies/outcomes required by CSWE are routinely met (exceeding the benchmark of having 85% or more of students score in the adequate to outstanding range). The Program also assesses its implicit curriculum (learning outside the classroom or course). In this area, the Program’s strengths include strong advising relationships between students and faculty, the presence of a student social work organization to engage students, and strong attention to issues of diversity.
Teacher Education
The Teacher Education Department regularly assesses its students and programs regarding institutional objectives and state and national standards. Institutional data demonstrate that Bethel students and graduates compare favorably with local, state, and national indicators. Affirmation of this assessment has been provided by the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) and the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) (onsite visit, March 2019). For further consumer information about the education programs, see consumer information at the following website: https://www.bethelks.edu/academics/areas-study/teacher-education
Visual Arts and Design
Art major:
Our current senior majors are assessed through art writing, oral presentations, and the senior exhibit. Students earlier in the program are evaluated through a sophomore-level assessment rubric based on work in the foundations courses and an individual presentation to department faculty. Our recent students have been more successful presenting ideas orally than in writing, so to help our students improve their art writing skills, we now incorporate multiple writing assignments into all of the lower- and upper-level art history and design history courses. To help our students more adequately prepare for their senior exhibits and presentations, since Fall 2017, we have offered Art Seminars in the fall rather than in the spring and set multiple deadlines to break projects down into smaller steps.
Graphic Design major:
We see growing interest in the Graphic Design major among younger students, and we have moved toward stability in staffing those courses. Our senior majors are assessed through art writing, an oral presentation, the senior exhibit, and a design-based internship. Students earlier in the program are evaluated through a sophomore-level assessment rubric based on a presentation to faculty about their work in foundations courses. To help our students improve their art writing skills, we are now incorporating writing assignments into the lower and upper-level art history and design history courses. To help our students more adequately prepare for their senior exhibits and presentations, since Fall 2017, we have offered an art seminar in the fall rather than in the spring. In 2019-20 we will also further clarify the language of our internship assessment to work toward more consistent use of the employer evaluation tool.