From cturrentine at keene.edu Fri Aug 19 08:50:20 2016 From: cturrentine at keene.edu (Turrentine, Cathy) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 13:50:20 +0000 Subject: [COPLAC-IR] a small heads-up Message-ID: Colleagues - I am writing with a small (and positive!) heads-up for you. You may soon receive a call or email from your president, chancellor, or provost, and I want you to have some background information about it. If they attended the COPLAC meeting in June, they heard a presentation about the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT), and received a follow-up email message today from my Keene State faculty colleague Dr. Patrick Dolenc (see below). The presentation and email message offer an opportunity for COPLAC schools to learn about CAT together by administering it to a small group on each campus and sending teams to a scoring workshop next summer. Besides introducing your own campus to CAT, this project would begin to establish some baseline data about critical thinking skills of students in public liberal arts colleges nationally, data that could be valuable to all of us. So you may soon receive a call or email from someone further up the organization chart, asking whether you can take this on this year. Please consider saying yes. For Keene State College, CAT has been a wonderful tool for assessment, faculty development, and improvement of teaching and learning around critical thinking skills. I am happy to recommend it. Attached is the brief summary about CAT that Patrick handed out at the COPLAC conference. If you want more information you can find it here: https://www.tntech.edu/cat. And if your institution decides to participate in this opportunity and you want to discuss how it works for us, feel free to give me a call. Cathy ************************************************** Cathryn Turrentine, Ph.D. Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Keene State College Hale Building, 3rd Floor 229 Main St. Keene, NH 03435-1506 603-358-2117 The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provides evidence to inform decision-making and leads the College's efforts to assess student learning. [cid:image001.png at 01CC10BB.D050B260] As you may recall, when we were in Cedar City (Utah) in late June I announced an opportunity to explore the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT) across COPLAC institutions in the spring 2017 semester with a collaborative meeting next summer to score the tests and discuss the results. As the fall semester approaches, I am building a distribution list of the appropriate people on the campuses that have decided to join this pilot. Would your campus be interested in participating in this project? If so, can you provide me with contact information for the person (or people) that I should communicate with as the project unfolds? Thank you for you assistance with this, I hope that your campus decides to join this exciting project. Patrick Dolenc Professor of Economics Keene State College -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 9011 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CAT COPLAC SUMMARY.docx Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document Size: 17394 bytes Desc: CAT COPLAC SUMMARY.docx URL: From hwen at ncf.edu Fri Aug 19 09:07:28 2016 From: hwen at ncf.edu (Hui-Min Wen) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 10:07:28 -0400 Subject: [COPLAC-IR] a small heads-up In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Cathy: Thank you for the heads-up. Is this critical thinking test more appropriate for science students? Do you assess humanities students with this test? Hui-Min On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Turrentine, Cathy wrote: > Colleagues ? > > > > I am writing with a small (and positive!) heads-up for you. You may soon > receive a call or email from your president, chancellor, or provost, and I > want you to have some background information about it. > > > > If they attended the COPLAC meeting in June, they heard a presentation > about the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT), and received a follow-up > email message today from my Keene State faculty colleague Dr. Patrick > Dolenc (see below). The presentation and email message offer an opportunity > for COPLAC schools to learn about CAT together by administering it to a > small group on each campus and sending teams to a scoring workshop next > summer. Besides introducing your own campus to CAT, this project would > begin to establish some baseline data about critical thinking skills of > students in public liberal arts colleges nationally, data that could be > valuable to all of us. > > So you may soon receive a call or email from someone further up the > organization chart, asking whether you can take this on this year. Please > consider saying yes. For Keene State College, CAT has been a wonderful tool > for assessment, faculty development, and improvement of teaching and > learning around critical thinking skills. I am happy to recommend it. > > > > Attached is the brief summary about CAT that Patrick handed out at the > COPLAC conference. If you want more information you can find it here: > https://www.tntech.edu/cat. And if your institution decides to > participate in this opportunity and you want to discuss how it works for > us, feel free to give me a call. > > > > Cathy > > > > ************************************************** > > Cathryn Turrentine, Ph.D. > > Director of Institutional Research and Assessment > > Keene State College > > Hale Building, 3rd Floor > > 229 Main St. > > Keene, NH 03435-1506 > > 603-358-2117 > > > > *The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provides evidence to > inform decision-making and leads the College?s efforts to assess student > learning. * > > > > [image: cid:image001.png at 01CC10BB.D050B260] > > > > > > As you may recall, when we were in Cedar City (Utah) in late June I > announced an opportunity to explore the Critical thinking Assessment Test > (CAT) across COPLAC institutions in the spring 2017 semester with a > collaborative meeting next summer to score the tests and discuss the > results. > > > > As the fall semester approaches, I am building a distribution list of the > appropriate people on the campuses that have decided to join this pilot. Would > your campus be interested in participating in this project? If so, can > you provide me with contact information for the person (or people) that I > should communicate with as the project unfolds? > > > > Thank you for you assistance with this, I hope that your campus decides to > join this exciting project. > > > > Patrick Dolenc > > Professor of Economics > > Keene State College > > > > _______________________________________________ > COPLAC-IR mailing list > COPLAC-IR at lists.onenet.net > http://lists.onenet.net/mailman/listinfo/coplac-ir > -- Hui-Min Wen, Ph.D. NCF Data Administrator Director, Institutional Research & Assessment *New College of Florida* 5800 Bay Shore Road Sarasota, FL 34243-2109 Tel: (941) 487-4601 Fax: (941) 487-4201 E-mail: hwen at ncf.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 9011 bytes Desc: not available URL: From cturrentine at keene.edu Fri Aug 19 09:24:27 2016 From: cturrentine at keene.edu (Turrentine, Cathy) Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 14:24:27 +0000 Subject: [COPLAC-IR] a small heads-up In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks for the question. We have used CAT in a selection of courses from all academic schools and at all levels. All of the questions are real-world scenarios. (Do you accept this advertising claim? Is this interpretation of a simple graph the only reasonable explanation? Is this ?expert? opinion logical? What information do you need to make a complex decision?) Some of the questions look like our first-year quantitative literacy curriculum. They are a very good natural fit for sciences, social sciences, and many of our professional studies programs. The question content does not come directly from arts or humanities, but I have used it in some of those classes and so far I haven?t seen any reason that it doesn?t work. One of the things I like most about CAT is that, once faculty have used it, they can be trained to overlay their own course content on the CAT question format, creating CAT Apps for their own courses. There is a growing national bank of CAT Apps, available online. Several Keene State faculty built their own CAT Apps this summer in disciplines across campus. Faculty who write CAT Apps can validate them with pre/posttests of the CAT and then, if the data align properly, the faculty member can legitimately use the CAT App (with philosophy content, or history, or women?s studies) to measure the very same critical thinking skills going forward. Cathy ************************************************** Cathryn Turrentine, Ph.D. Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Keene State College Hale Building, 3rd Floor 229 Main St. Keene, NH 03435-1506 603-358-2117 The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provides evidence to inform decision-making and leads the College?s efforts to assess student learning. [cid:image001.png at 01CC10BB.D050B260] From: Hui-Min Wen [mailto:hwen at ncf.edu] Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 10:07 AM To: Turrentine, Cathy Cc: COPLAC-IR at lists.onenet.net; Schmidl-Gagne, Kimberly ; Smeaton, George ; Dolenc, Patrick Subject: Re: [COPLAC-IR] a small heads-up Cathy: Thank you for the heads-up. Is this critical thinking test more appropriate for science students? Do you assess humanities students with this test? Hui-Min On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Turrentine, Cathy > wrote: Colleagues ? I am writing with a small (and positive!) heads-up for you. You may soon receive a call or email from your president, chancellor, or provost, and I want you to have some background information about it. If they attended the COPLAC meeting in June, they heard a presentation about the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT), and received a follow-up email message today from my Keene State faculty colleague Dr. Patrick Dolenc (see below). The presentation and email message offer an opportunity for COPLAC schools to learn about CAT together by administering it to a small group on each campus and sending teams to a scoring workshop next summer. Besides introducing your own campus to CAT, this project would begin to establish some baseline data about critical thinking skills of students in public liberal arts colleges nationally, data that could be valuable to all of us. So you may soon receive a call or email from someone further up the organization chart, asking whether you can take this on this year. Please consider saying yes. For Keene State College, CAT has been a wonderful tool for assessment, faculty development, and improvement of teaching and learning around critical thinking skills. I am happy to recommend it. Attached is the brief summary about CAT that Patrick handed out at the COPLAC conference. If you want more information you can find it here: https://www.tntech.edu/cat. And if your institution decides to participate in this opportunity and you want to discuss how it works for us, feel free to give me a call. Cathy ************************************************** Cathryn Turrentine, Ph.D. Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Keene State College Hale Building, 3rd Floor 229 Main St. Keene, NH 03435-1506 603-358-2117 The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment provides evidence to inform decision-making and leads the College?s efforts to assess student learning. [cid:image001.png at 01CC10BB.D050B260] As you may recall, when we were in Cedar City (Utah) in late June I announced an opportunity to explore the Critical thinking Assessment Test (CAT) across COPLAC institutions in the spring 2017 semester with a collaborative meeting next summer to score the tests and discuss the results. As the fall semester approaches, I am building a distribution list of the appropriate people on the campuses that have decided to join this pilot. Would your campus be interested in participating in this project? If so, can you provide me with contact information for the person (or people) that I should communicate with as the project unfolds? Thank you for you assistance with this, I hope that your campus decides to join this exciting project. Patrick Dolenc Professor of Economics Keene State College _______________________________________________ COPLAC-IR mailing list COPLAC-IR at lists.onenet.net http://lists.onenet.net/mailman/listinfo/coplac-ir -- Hui-Min Wen, Ph.D. NCF Data Administrator Director, Institutional Research & Assessment New College of Florida 5800 Bay Shore Road Sarasota, FL 34243-2109 Tel: (941) 487-4601 Fax: (941) 487-4201 E-mail: hwen at ncf.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.png Type: image/png Size: 9011 bytes Desc: image001.png URL: