1) First year student success is critical to WSU’s retention and graduation efforts. We are interested in finding out how departments support their first-year students. Do you have mechanisms and processes in place to identify, meet with, and support first-year students? Please provide a brief narrative focusing on your program’s support of new students:
a. Any first-year students taking courses in your program(s).
We do not currently have any mechanisms
b. Students declared in your program(s), whether or not they are taking courses in your program(s)
We do not currently have any mechanisms
2) A key component of sound assessment practice is the process of ‘closing the loop’ – that is, following up on changes implemented as a response to your assessment findings, to determine the impact of those changes/innovations. It is also an aspect of assessment on which we need to improve, as suggested in our NWCCU mid-cycle report. Please describe the processes your program has in place to ‘close the loop’.
We are starting the assessment process in the Finance Major as we are a recently created, stand-alone major. As we assess our learning outcomes, we will look to see if our learning outcomes are being met by our students. In instances where are our students are not meeting the desired proficiency we will choose appropriate ‘close the loop’ actions that will help our students master the learning outcome. After choosing a ‘close the loop’ action, during our next assessment period, we will measure whether the ‘close the loop’ actions are helping students master the learning outcome. If mastery is not achieved, we will repeat the process.
The full report is available for viewing.