Monmouth collaborates on academic study

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

Over the next three years, Monmouth College will participate in a study, along with three other schools in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, to assess the role of the academic major in the education of a liberal arts student.

Monmouth, along with Beloit, Knox and Ripon Colleges, will be using funds from a grant from the Teagle Foundation which will “examine the relationship between aspects of general education and the major,” as stated in a memo sent to Monmouth College Introduction to Liberal Arts instructors by Marta Tucker, associate dean of the faculty, Cheryl Meeker, associate professor of art and Steve Price, director of communication across the curriculum. The three are heading up the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which must be administered to 100 first-year students before the end of the fall 2006 semester. A group of 100 outgoing senior students will be surveyed during the spring 2007 semester.

The CLA, along with the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), are common links among the four participating schools. Results from these two assessments, as well as some other factors which still need to be defined, will help the schools determine “how much value has been added” through both the academic major departments and general education courses.

The Teagle Foundation, based in New York City, gives grants to colleges for the purpose of “generating new ideas, know-how and approaches, that is, knowledge likely to be useful far beyond the confines of any individual grant recipient,” as the President’s Welcome says on the foundation’s website.

In order to receive the grant, Monmouth College had to prepare a proposal for a study which was then accepted by the Teagle Foundation. According to Tucker, Monmouth and the three other schools wrote the proposal a year ago, but it was not accepted outright for grant money at the time. Instead, the four schools were given a one-year grant for the further development of the proposal, which eventually led to the current grant. The four schools were awarded a grant of more than $297,000 to conduct their research.

The project, along with the administration of the CLA, will involve a total of four academic departments for two years each. The work done in each of the departments will help to “develop departmental value-added assessment plans that include the measurement of general education goals of civic engagement, quantitative reasoning and critical thinking,” Tucker said. Those three general education goals are shared by all four colleges, so the committee thought them to be good measures of a program’s success.

In addition, the departmental work will attempt to determine the role an academic major, along with academic advising within that major, of measuring a student’s success in that particular discipline, but also “enriching the breadth of our students’ education through co-curricular and experiential, as well as classroom, learning,” Tucker stated.

The third portion of this study will involve faculty workshops. Smaller-scale workshops will be held on each individual campus, within the school’s faculty. There will also be larger, collaborative workshops on a campus and will involve faculty from all four schools. The first of this type of workshop will be held in October on the Knox College campus.

Tucker said this study comes at a good time for Monmouth, as the general education program has undergone some major revisions recently. This study, Tucker stated, hopes to “emphasize the integration between co-curricular and the major in a way that is consistent with the goals of [Monmouth’s] new curriculum.”