1.2.a Describe areas of the standard at which the unit is currently performing at the target level. Summarize activities and their impact on candidate performance and program quality that have led to target level performance. Discuss plans and timelines for attaining and/or sustaining target level performance as articulated in unit Standard 1.
UTC’s Professional Education Unit student enrollment has increased from 1,185 in 2007 to 2007 candidates in fall 2012. As these increases are felt across the Unit, faculty realize the importance of growing and improving to meet the demands of the students. With smaller numbers with programs, faculty could work with anecdotal data to respond to student needs. As the number of students increased, this anecdotal data became harder to analyze and much more difficult to use to address programmatic issues of the growing student population. What once worked, individual excel files within various departments, no longer was adequate to address needs. The need to merge files into one central location became reality when an Assessment Coordinator was hired in August of 2010.
Since this hire, the Professional Education Unit has created an assessment advisory committee. This group
is charged with reviewing data across the Unit and making suggestions and recommendations to programs for program improvement, integrity and overall quality. The advisory committee has overseen the data collection process for NCATE, required meetings of program faculty to address deficits and continually address individual program needs of how best to collect, analyze and interpret data to benefit students within these programs. This committee is young and many assessment challenges were presented in the initial meetings. To respond to the request of the Assessment Advisory Committee, programs are currently reviewing program reports, examining common assessments, redesigning key assessments and products and rethinking coursework to best reflect the national standards of each program. As a result from these meetings, changes are being made to better serve UTC’s teacher candidate.
