[COPLAC-IR] a small heads-up

[Turrentine, Cathy]

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.

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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

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