SWAU's Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP)

The Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is a part of Southwestern Adventist University’s accreditation requirements. SWAU is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). The QEP is unique to SACSCOC and provides a forward-looking element to accreditation. SACSCOC, then, requires accredited schools to plan what they will do to improve their educational student performance and not just demonstrate what they, as institutions, have done well in the past. 

The SACSCOC Resource Manual covers many aspects of accreditation. Section 7.2 (the section dealing with the QEP) says the following:

The institution has a Quality Enhancement Plan that (a) has a topic identified through its ongoing, comprehensive planning and evaluation processes; (b) has broad-based support of institutional constituencies;  (c) focuses on improving specific student learning outcomes and/or student success; (d) commits resources to initiate, implement, and complete the QEP; and (e) includes a plan to assess achievement.

The QEP for this accreditation cycle (beginning in 2025) is Knight Readers, an effort aimed at having students improve their reading skills while lowering their reading anxiety. We have two goals:

• Students will increase their reading ability, especially of academic materials
• Students will, on average, have lower reading anxiety levels by the end of the school semester/year

Our official QEP Executive Summary reads as follows:

Executive Summary

Southwestern Adventist University (SWAU) educates a diverse student body for service and leadership in a Christ-centered environment shaped by Seventh-day Adventist Christian beliefs. Our mission is to inspire knowledge, faith, and service through Christ-centered education. While knowledge may come in many forms, it is often transmitted through written material. We read to better understand our world and our place within it. Therefore, an important part of the university’s mission can be linked to increasing our students’ reading ability which will enhance the way they gain knowledge.
However, as Edwards, Caucourt, Hart, and Schatschneider (2023) note, “despite research showing that over 80% of college-level tasks involve reading (Simpson & Nist, 2000), approximately 75% of community college students and more than 50% of four-year college students are ill-equipped to effectively handle college literacy demands. . .” (p. 1147) . To ameliorate the problem of poor reading, we have chosen as our Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP): Knight Readers, an effort to improve our students’ reading abilities and to lessen their reading anxiety. 
Our QEP has two overarching outcomes: 1) Students will increase their reading ability, especially of academic materials and 2) students will have lower reading anxiety levels by the end of the school year. We will work to achieve these goals by focusing on reading across the curriculum, with instructors emphasizing not only the importance of reading but also by providing reading instruction, especially of textbooks and academic journals. We will assess these measures in two ways: we will give a pre and post-test using the Nelson Denny Reading Test to assess to what degree students are improving their reading abilities; and, we will have students take a survey (pre-instruction and post-instruction) of reading attitudes to assess their perceptions regarding their reading confidence. 
SWAU has begun implementing the plan for the academic year 2024-25, which we are calling year zero of the QEP. We will revise the plan as needed based on our assessments to prepare for year one of the QEP in 2025-26. We will assess and revise the program as needed each year through year five, when we will submit the fifth-year report on our efforts.