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Art
Our current senior majors are assessed through formal analysis art writing, an oral presentation and the senior exhibit. Students earlier in the program are evaluated through a sophomore-level assessment rubric, based on work in the foundations courses. Recent students have been more successful in presenting ideas orally than in writing. To help our students improve their art writing skills, we now incorporate multiple writing assignments into all 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 Seminar in the fall rather than spring.
Athletic Training
The athletic training program collects various assessment data annually aimed at student performance and program quality goals. The Board of Certification (BOC) for the Athletic Trainer Exam is one method of measuring program quality through student (graduate) performance. Over the course of the past 10 years, this data has favorably reflected the quality of the Bethel College program for an extended period of time. Due to lower numbers of students enrolled, these have varied and tapered over the past three years for various reasons. With a pending change in degree level for the athletic training profession (transitioning from undergraduate to master’s), many programs our size are facing a similar dip in pass rate performance. In addition to collecting BOC pass rate data, the Commission on Accreditation for Athletic Training Education (CAATE) requires programs to collect and publicly post-graduate employment data and retention data. These numbers can be found on the Bethel College AT program website. The program also collects data related to student performance with frequent preceptor evaluations of student field experience progression, student evaluation of preceptors and clinical/field experience sites, and graduate surveys of the quality of the program and education, along with student performance on a variety of course assignments to measure achievement of program goals. This data is used to monitor quality and, in the past, has led to changes in curriculum and pedagogy.
Bible and Religion
One student graduated in 2017-18 with a double major in Bible and Religion and Social work. A new half-time instructor joined the department, bringing increased visibility and stability to the curriculum. Most of the teaching done in the BRL department continues to be focused on students taking our courses to meet requirements in the common core of our General Education program.
Biology
The great majority (more than 90%) 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 continue to make 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 are developing and the capstone paper is being written.
Business
Bethel College’s bachelor of science degree in business administration is designed to expose students to skill sets in high demand not only for business but also for 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, Bethel’s business department is led by three women. Recent AAUW reports suggest that across the nation, females account for 20-30% of full time faculty in business programs. It is our pleasure to be outliers in this group. http://aacsbblogs.typepad.com/dataandresearch/gender/
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 less able to successfully complete college-level academic tasks. The department is encouraged to see additional support services 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 2017-2018 academic year, ten students successfully 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 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. 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 that their knowledge and conceptual understanding is better than that obtained by students in equivalent classes across the nation. For those areas that we failed to meet this objective, we will revise our assignments, lecture materials and class activities to help students gain a better mastery of the material. Chemistry students are also actively engaged in research projects. Many of our students present their research findings at the annual URICA Symposium and local and national chemical conferences, such as the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. Finally, we have placed all graduates of 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 reveals an uptick in student achievement in comparison to previous years. Students approached, met or exceeded assessment benchmarks. Their confidence and competence in public presentations/performances and academic writing has improved (Goal II), as well as their ability to articulate meaningful connections among historical, theoretical, and practical implications of communication processes (Goal III). In Fall 2018, the department offered COA 337-Communication Theory and Research Methods for the first time, a required course designed to prepare students to understand concepts, methods, tools and theories by which communication research is designed, conducted, interpreted and critically evaluated. We anticipate seminar papers and presentations by students in the coming years (who meet the revised requirements in the 2017-18 catalog) to improve in their knowledge of a variety of communication theories that explain messages across various media platforms (Goal III).
Elementary Education
The recent 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.
English
The theme for the English department’s assessment is three-fold: 1) Our recently adopted use of a new mid-stream writing evaluation assessment tool continues to be an essential step in tracking our majors’ learning before that ultimate senior assessment; 2) We successfully identified an area for improvement in 2016-17 assessment results (Integrative Abilities), and those scores did improve on average when assessed for this report; 3) Having lived through a major curricular revision, we look forward to assessing our students’ learning in the upcoming years.
Graphic Design
We are excited to see growing interest in the Graphic Design major among younger students, and we are eager for stability in staffing of those courses. Our current senior majors are assessed through formal analysis art writing, an oral presentation and the senior exhibit. Students earlier in the program are evaluated through a sophomore-level assessment rubric, based on work in the foundations courses. To help our students improve their art writing skills, we are now incorporating 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, we now offer Art Seminar in the fall rather than spring. In 2018-19, we revised our assessment of the internship requirements for graphic design majors in alignment with a newly identified goal related to initiative and creative problem-solving in a professional internship setting.
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 using coursework with well-established grading tools to assess better 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.
History
History majors are assessed on three goals: demonstrate comprehensive basic knowledge of key themes, events, ideas and people across a broad expanse of history; develop and demonstrate clear written analysis of historical narrative, effective speaking about and explanation of historical events, as well as library and manuscript research skills; identify and analyze the interrelationship of complex factors (for example, social, cultural, religious, economic factors) involved in the development of historical events. A strong cohort of students in the 2017-18 History Seminar exceeded all three areas of goal 2. One student failed to meet Goal 3 and one student with an Individualized Major following a non-traditional curriculum did not do well on the standardized test used to assess student learning on Goal 1.
Math
We assess our students based on 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 people, 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, along with the ETS Major Field Test in Mathematics.
After several years of staffing turnover, most 2017-18 majors did not meet our goal related to the ETS Major Field Test in Mathematics. We are hopeful that our new hire in mathematics and an improvement in matriculation rates in courses beyond our entry-level courses are the start of a recovery for the number of students in our upper-level courses and the number of mathematics majors.
Music
On the Major Field Tests in Music, the majority of our graduating seniors continue to score above the 65% designation, with some scoring 90% or above. These scores are compared to all schools of music taking the Major Field Tests in Music. The formal evaluations of the Senior Recital Preview performance and the Senior Recital Preview program notes appear to guide seniors in preparation for their senior recital. The implementation of the Sophomore Jury Review form is providing more extensive feedback for all sophomores interested in becoming music majors.
Nursing
The Department of Nursing continues to monitor student performance on the NCLEX-RN exam and program-identified student outcomes to ensure the program meets approval requirements by KSBN and accreditation requirements by CCNE. In addition, the program continued refining the evaluation tool used during the holistic admission process. Holistic admissions consider a broad range of elements along with traditional admission criteria that can reflect an applicant’s academic readiness, potential academic success and success on the licensing exam. In admitting high-quality students, student retention is improved, as well as students’ first-time success on the NCLEX-RN exam. The Department of Nursing worked at several testing and evaluation procedures in preparation for changes to the NCLEX-RN exam expected to be initiated in April 2019.
Psychology
Psychology majors are assessed on three goals: display professional skills, e.g., basic communication and analytic skills related to work with colleagues both within and outside the profession of psychology and with clients and the public; demonstrate psychology-based understandings, e.g., a basic knowledge of psychology, both of its methods and of its theoretical and empirical content; and manifest a diverse set of integrative abilities, e.g., being able to think critically and ethically as well as integrate information both within the discipline of psychology and in society at large. The five graduates in 2017-18 met all senior-level goals and objectives.
Social Work
The social work program, fully accredited for over 40 years, continues to monitor student success on the nine competencies required by the Council on Social Work Education. Achievement of each competency is assessed using two measures, one course-embedded measure (such as a paper, exam or lab assignment) and one in the field placement. Each competency is also assessed in regard to four components: affective and critical processing; relevant values and ethics; skills; and knowledge. In the most recent assessment, the social work program met all its benchmarks for student outcomes. Some of the continuous strengths shown in the assessment come in diversity, ethics and professionalism, relationship building and engagement, and social work assessment. Each year, faculty examine the lowest ratings (although they may still be above the benchmark) and change assignments, teaching, or field instructor training to raise those scores. For instance, we changed the instructor in the Policy Analysis course and revised an assignment concerning policy in the Pre-practice Seminar/Field Instruction course to address the policy-related competency.
In addition to assessing the explicit curriculum, the program also assesses the implicit curriculum with a yearly survey and focus group of senior students. Examples of topics examined include student involvement and leadership opportunities, satisfactory progress and termination policies, and advising.
The program recently completed a self-study and site visit by the Commission on Accreditation of the Council on Social Work Education, reaffirming its eight-year accreditation in February 2019.
Teacher Education
The Department of Teacher Education continues to monitor student performance at three checkpoints in a student’s educational program, including both internal (GPA, recommendations, portfolio) and external (Core Academic Skills for Educators – Reading, Writing, Mathematics; Kansas Performance Teaching Portfolio; Principals of Learning and Teaching Test; Educational Testing Service content assessment) measures, aligned with student outcomes, to ensure the program continues to meet approval requirements for teacher licensure in Kansas. In addition to these assessments, the program continued the pilot of the Kansas Clinical Assessment Tool (K-CAT) used to assess student progress in their student teaching experience. Reliability studies of this tool are being conducted with KSDE and REL Central. As demonstrated on the teacher education web page under “Title II Information,” the program has had a 100% licensure rate over the past two years, which indicates that each program completer successfully achieved a passing score on the internal and external measures listed above. The program has worked over the past year to ensure that each assessment used for candidate assessment and program improvement are reliable and valid. The Bethel College teacher education program is accredited by the Kansas State Board of Education (KSBE) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). During the spring 2019 semester, the program hosted an accreditation visit by KSDE and the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), which has replaced NCATE.