Hello everyone,
 
This school year has flown by and we are already very near graduation and the end of our Spring semester. Therefore, I want to update you on the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) initiative with this year-end report. This will be a rather lengthy read, but the QEP is a vital part of our SACSCOC accreditation. Everyone on this campus, including students, staff, faculty, and administrators, must know about our QEP. Even some people not on this campus, the Board of Trustee members and alumni, must know about our QEP. Our SACS site visit occurs next February 16-19 and at that time we are going to demonstrate to our evaluators that SWAU is performing very well and deserves full affirmation. The QEP will not let you down, but we must all share in this effort by learning about the initiatives and we must each play our part in the endeavor.
 
At the end of the last year school year (2023-24), during April and May of ‘24, the faculty, staff, and the Board of Trustees separately voted to accept the topic of reading as the QEP initiative for the next QEP cycle, which begins next year in 2025-26. This year’s work on the QEP took place in what we are calling year zero, or a trial-run year, to work out any potential issues and to make sure we hit the ground running for next year, which is year one of our ten-year QEP cycle which will end in 2035. 
 
We could not really begin work on the QEP until the Board officially voted on the plan, which it did on May 5, the day of graduation. During the summer we selected people to join the QEP committee. They are as follows: 

• Emily De la Garza (faculty in the biology department, and alumna of SWAU)
• Jayne Doneskey (faculty in the English department, with expertise in Language and Literacy)
• Coby Federowski (staff, Digital Marketing Manager, and alumn of SWAU)
• Rahneeka Hazelton (VP for Enrollment)
• Russ Laughlin (VP for Spiritual Life)
• Tishana McCloud (data analyst, and alumna of SWAU)
• Anjali Ramella (student, SA officer–Student Association Publications Editor)
• Renee Sensebaugh (member of the Board of Trustees, and alumna of SWAU)
• Marcel Sargeant (VP for Institutional Research and Effectiveness)
• April Snyder (pastor of a community church, and alumna of SWAU)
• Cheryl The (faculty in the Education and Psychology Department, with expertise in Language and Literacy)

 
When Fall semester neared, we scheduled a QEP meeting and began our work. We chose a name (Knight Readers), our SLOs (to improve student reading ability and to lower student reading anxiety), our action plans, and our forms of assessment. 
 
Since reading improvement is something we want to see happen across the disciplines, we treated the solution to the problem similarly: we would focus on reading across the curriculum (RAC). We will not rely on a small subset of the campus for the interventions we need to improve student reading and lower reading anxiety. Rather, while the QEP committee and the director assess our SLOs, everyone on campus assists in making reading a more important part of students’ performance. The faculty have a special interest: they teach these students. Therefore, the intervention for increasing reading skills and lowering reading anxiety is centered around faculty creating lesson plan units on reading, regardless of the content of the class. The teaching of reading becomes all faculty members’ responsibility, in Freshman Composition and General Psychology, in Life and Teachings of Jesus and Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy, in Survey of Chemistry and Social Media Strategy. 
 
To train faculty members how to incorporate reading units into their lesson plans, we had two training sessions. At the first session, on September 10, 2024 we focused on the first reading unit–teaching students to be better readers of their textbooks and other assigned reading. We tied in our demonstrations with the AVID training which the faculty received in the pre-school Colloquium. That AVID training also discussed the importance of textbook reading and RAC. All teachers could teach reading by explaining how to read a textbook and through the “think aloud” technique. Therefore, shortly after the semester had begun, faculty already had two informational sessions about reading, once at the AVID Colloquium session and another through the QEP training session in September. 
 
Our second training session took place on October 29, 2024 and focused on the teaching of academic journal articles. Faculty learned about communities of practice and how each academic discipline represents its own community with unique jargon, vocabulary, and ways to structure journal articles. With that theoretical foundation in place, we heard a demonstration of an academic journal article in English. That article's opacity demonstrated that even college-educated faculty might have trouble understanding discipline-specific articles. Therefore, we learned that students must be taught how to read academic journal articles within their own discipline. Biologists understand how to read articles in the Journal of Ecology, so they will make the best instructors of a lesson plan unit on reading in Ecology. We left that training session with the charge that faculty should build a lesson plan unit for their courses on how to read academic journals.
 
As the year progressed, we assessed our students’ reading ability with a pre and post test, the Nelson Denny Reading Test. I wrote reports after each of those assessments, so all interested parties (students, staff, faculty, and administration) will know how we are doing. We also assessed the students’ reading anxiety with a pre and post test, the Reading Attitudes Survey. I wrote reports after each of those tests. So, over the course of the year you’ve had four reports on QEP assessment:  two on the Nelson Denny (pre and post) and two on the Reading Attitudes Survey (pre and post). 
 
Based on our assessments and faculty/staff feedback, we have planned some changes for next year. We have listened to you and are adapting the QEP to better accommodate your interests and concerns.
 

• Based on feedback from the second training session, we heard you saying the following: the intervention of having every faculty teach two reading units in every course is overwhelming and may represent “overkill.” Students, taking five courses per semester (a standard load), would hear twenty lesson plan units on reading, ten on how to read their textbooks/assigned readings and ten on how to read an academic journal article. Responding to that concern, we have planned the following changes (note: these aren’t yet in effect and won’t be until the Fall of 2025): 
  • Freshmen and sophomores will receive reading training in three courses only: ENGL 121, Freshman Composition; ENGL 220, Research Writing; and UNIV 107, Habits for Success. Most freshmen will receive textbook training at least twice; in Freshman Composition and Habits for Success. Sophomores will receive textbook training at least once, in Research Writing.
  • Sophomores will also receive training in the reading of a journal article in Research Writing.
  • Juniors and Seniors will receive training in the reading of a journal article in one of their major’s core classes. I’ll use English as an example. Junior English majors will get journal article training in ENGL 321, Literary Theory, a required core class. Seniors will get such training in ENGL 442, Christians and Literature.
  • Therefore, students will still be getting lesson plan units in reading all four years of their academic journey, but with far fewer iterations. Will this considerable reduction in iterations still yield the results we are hoping for? We’ll know next Spring, as we will be able to assess our students’ reading abilities and anxieties and compare them to this year when they, theoretically, had many more such lesson plan units.
• Based on our Nelson Denny Reading Test assessment, we learned that freshmen improved their comprehension from 12.46 to 13.22. However, they did not improve their vocabulary scores much, from 12.47 to 12.56. We plan the following changes: 
  • The Word of the Day, which goes out over email and appears on the connected TV screens on campus. 
  • Additional vocabulary building, starting in 2025-26, especially with prefixes and roots. We have yet to establish the mechanism for such efforts, but we are considering Canvas.
• Based on Reading Attitudes Survey Results, we learned that students’ concerns about their reading skills have gotten better, with improved scores in multiple areas, such as “Do you feel self-conscious about your reading ability?” and “Do you fear people correcting you when you make a mistake reading?” But several scores showed that we still have work to do. Regarding the question “Does having to read a book or textbook feel like an insurmountable task?” the score improved from 37.44 percent of our students to 31.31 percent. That’s commendable, but leaves us, after a year of intervention, with one in every three students finding textbook reading insurmountable at least moderately often. In one area the score got worse. On the question “How much of the instructor's assigned reading do you typically read for a class?” we went from 29.94 percent to 36.36 percent reading less than 41% of the assigned reading. Here are some changes we will institute to address this particular issue of textbook reading:
  • We will ask all teachers to assess their assigned readings, via quizzes or writing assignments, recognizing that a lack of such assessment actually contributes to students’ non-reading behaviors (Del Principe, A., & Ihara, A., 2016). 
  • We will again do training sessions for the QEP, emphasizing the data that supports the importance of instructors both teaching reading skills and assessing the reading they assign. Such training will take place at the Fall pre-instruction Colloquium and in at least two other QEP-related faculty meetings.
  • We will design a survey to query faculty regarding their participation in the QEPs initiatives.
• Along with these changes, we will continue to add on interventions to increase the “culture” of reading on campus. We will 
  • continue to promote book clubs, endeavoring to add additional student-hosted clubs.
  • design QEP-related assemblies, with a featured speaker each semester who focuses on the importance of reading.
  • Initiate another poster/TV screen series, with various people displaying one of their favorite books, with the title “I’m a Knight Reader.”
  • We will bring on board the reading nooks in each building, with QEP-related themes.

 
I look forward to seeing what more we can do to improve our students’ reading abilities and lower their reading anxieties. Next year is year one of the QEP cycle. It’s time to dig in!