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John Carroll University / Student Life / Campus Ministry / Assessments / Use of Student Learning Evidence

We plan to integrate what we learned from from our 2017-2018 assessment data. We propose to “Close the Loop” in the following ways in the 2018-2019 academic year:

We will focus on implementing the following changes based on this year’s results:

  1. We will try to house all of our assessment in Qualtrics instead of Wufoo to avoid losing it when the University decides to clean out or close the Wufoo account.
  2. Growth areas for the Carroll Faith Communities (slide 33) include: arranging more meetings between Campus Ministers and the leaders to talk about their progress, challenges, and strengths. (One check in at the end of the first semester and one at the end of the second semester.) John and Gail offered to help meet with students and come up with “touch stones” to discuss.
  3. The CFC survey results also suggested that we build more community among the leaders themselves. John suggested a catered, potentially dress-up, dinner a few times a semester in O’Dea where different Campus Ministers give talks. The Campus Ministry staff concluded that we need to make the CFC leaders feel that their work is meaningful and that we can do that with catered meals and more contact with the Campus Ministers.
  4. To address CFC second semester retention, we thought that we would hold a new sign-up in January for groups.
  5. Campus Ministry will run its own survey for Ignatian Family Teach-in. Anne and John will develop the questions.
  6. We will have a talk on Catholic Social Teaching at the “Unpacking Social Justice Day” for immersion students and for election programming.
  7. We will run senior focus groups.

 

We plan to integrate what we learned from from our 2016-2017 assessment data. We propose to “Close the Loop” in the following ways in the 2017-2018 academic year:

  1. For the Eight-Day Silent Retreat we added a peer-review gathering for spiritual directors every evening so they can touch base. We realized that at the end of the retreat that some students still struggled to understand certain aspects of Ignatian spirituality, so we added a short 10-minute optional reflection by the spiritual director on an aspect of Ignatian Spirituality. After our staff discussed the assessment results from the 2016-2017 academic year, we concluded that at the next retreat John Scarano would give a talk overviewing the movements of the Spiritual Exercises since our data showed that students struggled to understand the movements.
  2. We are working on implementing some changes into the Carroll Faith Communities (CFC) in the 2017-2018 year based on our assessment results. 1) To address retention, we are assigning each person on the leadership team 6 leaders to follow up with throughout the year. We have allocated $70 to each of the four board members per semester so that they can go out for ice cream or coffee at these visits. The goal is to make sure that the leaders stay very involved and thus work hard to keep their participants involved. 2) We are also planning to train our leaders on the current week’s topic more thoroughly in the Monday night meetings. We switched our meeting times to 8pm so more people could attend after class. 3) Anne McGinness plans to learn how to use SPSS or “R” software so she can run correlations with our survey data next year to see what factors might affect retention. 4) We also added a sixth goal to CFC this year concerning student engagement in the Spring Semester. 5) We plan to add a separate box to the CFC participant survey so that students can identify if they are not Catholic and/or part of CRU (Campus Crusaders, which is the non-denominational bible study group that is a part of CFC). We want to be attentive to how our curriculum for CFC is serving the non-Catholic students. 6) We changed another one of our goals. Instead of measuring how students gain an understanding of the main issues facing the Church in CFC, we decided to broaden our definition so that it is more inviting to non-Catholics. We rephrased “the main issues I encounter as a person of faith living in this culture.”
  3. We plan to increase education around Ignatian discernment on the Crossroads retreat.
  4. We plan to implement in the following changes to Goal 5 assessment in the 2017-2018 year. 1) Our 1-credit students scored poorly on how their spirituality motivates them to work for change and live in solidarity with the poor. Campus Ministry determined that more education around the topic of spirituality is needed. This upcoming year we need to be clearer about the definition of spiritualty and how it relates to justice. We will work it into the post-immersion retreat. 2) We also decided to change our Faith that Does Justice question to eliminate “live in solidarity with the poor” because we thought that this was too advanced and potentially misleading because it was almost two questions in one. It takes a lifetime (if ever) to truly be in solidarity with the poor. 3) We would like to implement Catholic Social Teaching into the post-immersion retreat. 4) Our unit’s work around Education and Spirituality in the Immersion program could improve. Around 30 students scored “needs developing” in education and about 40 “need developing” spirituality on the immersion according to the faculty and staff who assessed them. See definitions of “education” and “spirituality” in our rubric, found here. We will work on these aspects as a team and have planned a follow up meeting over winter break to talk more about it. 5) We also plan to follow up with our Winter and May immersion partners to try to implement a ½ day of Action Planning while on the immersion. The immersions that do this training feel more prepared to act upon returning. 6) We changed the language on the poll from how “your faith demands that you work for justice” to how “your faith calls you to work for justice.” 7) We added a poll question about what motivates students to work for justice.
  5. The direct assessment data from the immersion students in the large group and the 1-credit students, who were asked to articulate how their faith motivated them to act for change, was lower than our unit would like to see. The large group scored better than the 1-credit students (probably because more is demanded of the students in the 1-credit who are asked to write an essay versus the students in the large groups who just write a phrase). All five of the 1-credit winter break students scored below “competent.” For the Spring break students, however, three out of four were competent. We hypothesize that the scores are low because students do not identify with the word “faith.” As mentioned above, we plan to increase our education around the term.
  6. The direct assessment data from the Immersion large group and the 1-credits aligns fairly well with the indirect assessment data from the whole immersion group, which shows that 48% of our students during the Winter trips and 23% of our students from the Spring Break trips were either unsure or not sure of how their faith demands that they work for justice. Our unit needs to put more time and energy into this area. One hypothesis as to why the Spring Break students scored higher is because our Spring Break trips (Immokalee working with migrant farmer workers, Louisville working with refugees, and Pine Ridge working with Lakota people) are tightly focused around justice issues and have a clear outlet for advocacy. Our Winter Break trips to Nicaragua and Jamaica (with the exception of the US/Mexico border) are not as tightly focused on social justice, even though they are great programs and work to educate our students in other ways. Another hypothesis is that the students do not feel a sense of faith.
  7. In the Summer of 2016 we identified that our students were lacking in their understanding of a “Faith that Does Justice,” and the data from the 2016-2017 academic year confirms this again. Last year we increased education around the topic at our post-immersion retreat and we started a video project, which we are still in the process of creating, on “a Faith that Does Justice.” We understand “a Faith that Does Justice” in terms of education around justice-related issues and in terms of faith and spirituality. Campus Ministry staff will work to clarify our definitions of faith and spirituality for the students.
  8. Campus Ministers are planning to follow up with our immersion coordinators to share a summary of the reports from the Faculty and Staff who observed them in their immersion location. We would like to create a formal opportunity to talk with them about leadership on the immersion.

We integrated what we learned from our 2015-2016 assessment data into the 2016-2017 academic year’s activities. We “closed the loop” by implementing the following changes in the 2016-2017 year:

  1. Increased CFC (Carroll Faith Community, once called Christian Life Community) leaders’ involvement with their CFC groups outside of their weekly meetings. We worked on this by a) working to educate the leaders, b) four of our leaders gave talks to the rest of the leaders on how best to create community with small groups on 9/26/16, c) we also encouraged group dinners and more large group activities, d) we increased publication around community-wide events.
  2. Increased education around “a faith that does justice” by creating a Faith that Does Justice video for John Carroll. Filming began October 3, 2016. Projected to be available on the web by December 2017.
  3. Increased education around “Issues facing the Church. We worked on this in the following ways: 1) We created a brown bag lunch series around Catholic Social Teaching and the Election, 2) Educated our CFC leaders at our monthly meetings. The leaders will in turn educate their groups.