Planning – Working with Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Nielsen, UPA designed and facilitated the university’s compact planning process, which is a unit-based planning process culminating in plans and resource allocations for all colleges and administrative units for 2007 to 2010. Karen Helm also coordinated a variety of planning retreats for the executive officers, deans, and vice provosts.
Assessment – Dr. Joni Spurlin led the university’s Assessment Work Group in the completion of a shared vision and Guiding Principles for Assessment as tools for coordinating assessment across undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as Student Affairs, Finance and Business, DELTA, and other areas.
Institutional Research – As the university moves toward implementation of a new student information system (SIS), UPA is playing a critical role in ensuring that the university will be able to retrieve from that system the data required for planning, decision-making, and reporting. Lewis Carson leads this effort for the university as chair of the SIS data reporting team. Jeannette Atkinson will play an increasingly important role in creating data and information as SIS is implemented in the coming years. One UPA service that attracts a lot of interest from both on-campus users and other institutions is peer comparisons. In addition to the usual studies of rankings, this year Carol Smith focused more research on identifying factors that contribute to improved graduation rates.
Survey Research – UPA’s survey team (Nancy Whelchel, Melissa Godwin, and Jenn Marks), working with a university committee, administered and reported on the first Faculty Well-Being Survey. Dr. Whelchel gave a dozen, tailor-made presentations on the results to a variety of groups around campus. The team is now at work designing a staff survey.
Special Projects – UPA continued to provide substantial support to LITRE, the University’s quality enhancement plan focusing on improving student learning with technology. Dr. Geetanjali Soni, LITRE’s new assessment director, joined the UPA group and is working with LITRE principal investigators across the university. Geetanjali worked with Joni to complete the first annual report on results of LITRE projects.
UPA also took responsibility for ClassEval, a new, centralized, online system for evaluation of instruction. UPA welcomed Kay Stewartnewman, who will develop this system. UPA piloted the system with 7 departments in December and moved to full implementation in the spring semester
Administration – In November, Jan Henderson coordinated UPA’s move back to Peele Hall from the Flex Building. UPA staff is happy to have returned to a larger, cleaner, better-organized office with better climate control. In addition, UPA overhauled its extensive website to become compliant with new accessibility requirements, a complex project involving every UPA staff member.
In February 2007, UPA used focus groups of department heads, vice provosts, directors, deans, and vice chancellors to assess its services. We found that our strengths include: website design and navigation; breadth and value of data and services; prompt and committed staff; and integration of processes with data. Our clients said we need to: become more proactive in presenting and interpreting data; empower end users by providing manipulable data, models, tools, and training; expand capacity for ad hoc analyses; expand capacity for conducting surveys for other units; provide more data and services to department heads; report enrollment data at more points during the year; develop data and models about program costs and resources; and work with other offices to reconcile data and to reduce duplication of reporting across different units at NC State.
UPA welcomed several new staff members: Trey Standish, Assistant Director for Enrollment Planning; Geetanjali Soni, Coordinator for LITRE Assessment; Kay StewartNewman, ClassEval analyst; and Alice Taylor, personnel data analyst.
Nancy Whelchel was nominated for the 2007 University Award for Excellence (EPA) in the Chancellor’s Division. Her work – with the routine survey program, special surveys like the Faculty Well-Being Survey, and as a mentor for her graduate students – has been outstanding. In addition, Nancy completed her three-year term chairing operations for the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), an association of more than 1,600 individuals from academic institutions, government agencies, non-profit groups, and commercial firms including the major U.S. pollsters.
The professional achievements and contributions of all UPA staff are listed at the end of this report.
As noted above, Melissa Godwin is a facilitator for NC State’s Study Circles in Race and Ethnic Relations. In addition, UPA is working with the Vice Provost for Diversity and African American Affairs to produce a diversity fact book, which will be used to develop goals for the future.
As the university continues to refine its vision and strategies for becoming a great university, UPA will provide much of the information and support. This effort includes retreat planning, developing and facilitating processes, providing information, and linking to related planning processes in development and marketing, enrollment management, and budgeting.
The SIS upgrade presents UPA with a critical challenge in making sure that the new system provides the information that will be needed to study enrollment patterns, teaching loads, retention and graduation rates, and many other issues. Data elements that are dropped, ill defined, or forgotten could be very costly to create in the future. The new SIS will also require that all of UPA’s programs used to create routine reports are rewritten next year. The new SIS also provides a welcome opportunity to move ahead with the data mart that UPA has dreamed of for many years, possibly in partnership with the new Institute for Advanced Analytics.
UPA will play a key role in the development of accountability measures and reporting. For twenty years, NC State has been committed to program-level, formative assessment of student learning and has resisted “rolling up” results into an institutional picture in order to encourage use by faculty. Now, however, the US Department of Education, UNC-GA, and SACS are all calling for institution-level, summative performance measures focused on student performance, including learning outcomes. This will require a change in NC State’s approach to assessment and development of new performance measures and reports for the university.
Like most offices of our kind, UPA’s biggest challenge is keeping up with the requests for information and with new technology. We rarely have the luxury to prepare analyses that anticipate an emerging need. However, each of us values the opportunity to serve the university in our respective roles as information providers, planners, evaluators, and facilitators of critical decisions. While we do not contribute directly to the university’s focal areas of energy and the environment, health and well-being, or educational innovation, UPA does contribute indirectly by facilitating the university’s planning process:
Jeannette Atkinson, Research Associate for Student Information
Conferences
Professional Development
Lewis Carson, Associate Director for Institution Research
University Service
Professional Development
Melissa Godwin, Coordinator for Survey Research
Publications and Presentations
Professional Service
University Service
Conferences
Professional Development
Karen Helm, Director
University Service
Conferences
Jan Henderson, Assistant to the Director
University Service
Professional Development
Administrative Support Banding Training, July 2006 Dreamweaver MX Level I, August 2006 EPA On-line Employment Training, August 2006 Career Banding Training, August 2006 Hiring Staff Personnel, August 2006 Online Budget Revision, December 2006
Geetanjali Soni, Coordinator of LITRE Assessment
Presentations
University Service
Conferences
Professional Development
Joni Spurlin, University Director for Assessment and Associate Director of UPA
Publications and Presentations
Spurlin, J., Rajala, S. & Lavelle, J. (2007) (eds.) Designing Better Engineering Education Through Assessment: A Practical Resource for Faculty and Department Chairs on Using Assessment and ABET Criteria to Improve Student Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing. Book Chapters
- Spurlin, J., Rajala, S., & Lavelle, J. (2007) Assessing student learning: ensuring undergraduate students are learning what we want them to learn. In J. Spurlin, S. Rajala, & J. Lavelle (eds.) Designing Better Engineering Education Through Assessment: A Practical Resource for Faculty and Department Chairs on Using Assessment and ABET Criteria to Improve Student Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing
- Spurlin, J. (2007) Assessment methods used in undergraduate program assessment. In J. Spurlin, S. Rajala, & J. Lavelle (eds.) Designing Better Engineering Education Through Assessment: A Practical Resource for Faculty and Department Chairs on Using Assessment and ABET Criteria to Improve Student Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
Published Articles Professional Service
- Bernold, L., Spurlin, J. E., & Anson, C. (2007) Understanding our students: A longitudinal-study of success and failure in engineering. Accepted for publication in Journal of Engineering Education, July.
- Spurlin, J. E. (2007). Book Review of Ubiquitous Computing in Education: Invisible Technology, Visible Impact, Mark van't Hooft and Karen Swan (eds.) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 2007. Book review published in: Educause Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 2.
- Spurlin, J. E. (2007). Using Needs Assessment as a Holistic Means for Improving Technology Infrastructure. Educause Learning Initiative White paper. June.
- Moskal, P., & Spurlin, J. (2006). Assessment Methodologies: Technology and Student Technology and Student Learning. Invited presentation at Educause Learning Initiative's Fall Forum on Assessment, September 2006.
- Spurlin, J. E., Raubenheimer, D., Nault, E., & Rajala, S. (2007). Improving Assessment Efficiency and Overcoming Barriers: Relating Programmatic Accreditation to Institutional Assessment. The NASPA International Assessment & Retention Conference, St. Louis, MO, June 2007.
- Raubenheimer, C. D., Spurlin, J., North Martin, S., & Mehlenbacher, B. (2007). North Carolina State University faculty in technology-rich contexts: Connecting teaching, learning and assessment in the classroom. UNC TLT Conference Proceedings.
Conferences
Professional Development
Trey Standish, Assistant Director for Enrollment Planning
University Service
Conferences
Professional Development
Kay StewartNewman, Coordinator of ClassEval Program
University Service
Professional Development
Nancy Whelchel, Assistant Director for Survey Research
Publications and Presentations
Professional Service
University Service
Conferences