Improvement Plan

Fall 2012

Due to the high pass rate seen in the results of the Fall 2012 SLO # 2 assessment, there are no immediate plans to make modifications in the course instructional methods at this time. It should be noted that there was an intense outreach to all the L/S faculty during the fall 2012 semester to assist them in using Voicethread to record student responses. This seems to have paid off in terms of students being comfortable enough with Voicethread to better record their responses for the appropriate length and clarity. 

Spring 2012

SLO # 3

An analysis of the items missed revealed that students were able to handle the main idea questions successfully, but struggled with some of the details items. It became obvious that the greatest challenge students faced was in attempting to give specific examples of given main ideas from the listening passage. This required students to use more expressive written language in that they needed to write short answers in their own words. The other detail items were multiple-choice and/or true false items which only required visual recognition of the correct details.

Given the above analysis of the difficulties students had with short answer type detail questions, it might be wise to give students more practice with and models of how to answer these type of questions throughout the course instruction. This may also lead to some type of modification of the course outline of record.

SLO # 2

In reviewing the results particularly of those students not meeting the minimum proficiency standard, it was evident that these students were unable to speak on the given topic for the minimum 200 to 250 word length. Additionally, they often seemed unable to respond appropriately to the topic, and had difficulty forming clear sentence structures to express their ideas. They also had numerous pronunciation and stress errors making their responses difficult to comprehend. It should be noted that originally there were to be 2 ESL instructor reviewers for this assessment; however, due to a health issue, there was only one reviewer available. This may be significant because the students being assessed were the reviewer’s own students. This could possibly have affected the results because the instructor was very familiar with the students’ speech patterns.

Although most of the students were able to successfully reach a passing standard on the speaking assessment, it might be appropriate to review the course content to ensure it includes enough opportunities for individual pronunciation and speaking practice. This may point to the need for a dedicated ESL lab component and required speaking resources and tools such as VoiceThread and English Central.