Getting Started with Program Review

Each program will start the review process every five years. Any program may initiate a new program review cycle before the five-year limit if warranted by significant event or planned change in the program.

Year One - Program Review

Review and report on your Basic Discipline Data, (download the Word document here)
From your data review, or from any other relevant issue in your program, name your "rocks" and choose which rock(s) you want to work on during your program review.
Formulate your "rock" inquiry project, (download the Word document here)
Review your Basic Discipline Data and "rock" project proposal with the Program Review committee.
The Basic Discipline Data Review and your Inquiry (Rock) Project Plan will substitute for your Unit Plan report EXCEPT that any requests for additional staffing or budget allocations should be submitted on the appropriate form from the Unit Plan package.

Years Two through Five

Start working on your "rock" inquiry project, including assessment. (download the Word document here)
Report on your progress as part of your Unit Plan report
Submit your final inquiry (rock) project report to your dean, to be forwarded to the Program Review committee for publishing on the web site.

Basic Discipline Data Review

The Office of Academic Services will assemble the standard reports for your basic data review.

Questions related to Basic Data

I. Basic Success (3 years) . You will be able to look at reports at the program and course level. You will be able to look at each report in three ways: totals for that category, breakdowns by gender, and breakdowns by ethnicity. This data is also available on your local computer. You need to go to the EMC homepage, available on-campus at http://help/EMC/. You can download the tool and the data to your C drive

How do your basic success data compare to the college as a whole? What might explain the differences? Is this an issue or non-issue as you see it?
What courses in your discipline show the least/greatest amount of success? What accounts for differences between courses? How could you improve success in the less successful areas?
What do you see in the comparisons between men and women and between different ethnicities? What accounts for differences? What concerns you? How could you strategically address the concerns?

II. Course Sequence (2 years) This data is available by request from the IR office. This data focuses on course sequences within your discipline and follows students over two years. Most of the sequences mirror prerequisite patterns. It looks at success and non-success in the first course of a sequence and then follows the successful students for two years, indicating enrollment in the second (and/or third) course and success or non-success.

Is success in the first course a good indicator of success in the second course? Run with the curricular, pedagogical, and/or methodological implications of what you see.
Do you successful students in the first course enroll at a high rate in the second course within two years? Run with the implications of what you see.

III. Course Review (5 years) This data looks at all the courses currently being offered by your discipline in the Chabot catalogue; it indicates the last time each course was updated in the Curriculum Committee.

Ed. Code requires that all courses are updated every five years. Are all of your courses updated? If not, do you want to maintain or continue these courses? Please indicate your plans in terms of curriculum. (Note: if you are planning a major or fundamental change in your curriculum which will become part of your program review project, your rock, you should indicate this and discuss with the committee.)
Have all of your courses been offered recently? If not, why? Are students counting on courses to complete a program or major when these courses are not being offered?

IV. Budget Summary (3 years) The spreadsheet shows your budget in the following categories: staffingclassified, students, supplies and materials, services, and equipment.

What budget trends do you see in your discipline? What are the implications of these trends?

Where is your budget adequate or lacking? What are the consequences on your program, your students, and/or your instruction?

V. Enrollment Data (2 years) You will need to look at enrollment data from the last two academic years. This data is also available to you on the enrollment management website on our intranet, available on-campus at http://help/EMC/

Please provide a brief description of: overall enrollment trends; enrollment trends by course; and enrollment trends by time of day and Saturday.

Describe what your discipline has done in terms of curriculum or scheduling in the last two years that has effected enrollments.

Describe plans or strategies that you have for the near future in terms of curriculum or scheduling that could impact your enrollments.

Lastly, look closely at whether the schedule you currently offer provides access to the broader community that your discipline serves at Chabot Collegeday time, night time, Saturday, distance education, special or targeted communities that would or do enroll your courses.

VI. SLOs and Assessment You need to provide a summary of the SLOs and Assessments done by your discipline to date at the course and program level.

Review the SLO Summary Spreadsheet with the courses with written SLOs and the number of SLOs per courses and which SLOs have been assessed.

For the courses that dont yet have SLOs please enter an estimated date for when those will be written.

For the SLOs which have not yet been assessed, please provide an estimated date for when that will be done. (The assessment process can be integrated into your program review rock project.)

What's a Rock?

A rock is a(n): practice, issue, learning outcome, curriculum design, goal, experiment, problem, methodology, or approach related to teaching/counseling/librarianing/instructional assisting—student learning. Another way to put this might be: a rock is a question related to Chabot students learning.

The inquiry (rock) proposal will include a timeline with check-in points (progress reports). The normal method for reporting on your inquiry will be through the annual Unit Plan.

The inquiry (rock) project will culminate in a report of findings. The final report will be published on the Program Review Committee intranet web site and made available to the college community. The inquiry (rock) group will naturally serve as a resource from which the rest of the college community can learn. The PRC will actively help promote the findings and recommendations of the inquiry (rock) group to the appropriate areas and committees of the college. The PRC will also support the inquiry (rock) group with any follow up activities that were recommended by the study.

Rock Proposals

Rock Introduction

1) Briefly describe the rock.
2) Briefly describe the impetus for wanting to spend time studying the rock.
3) Briefly describe the way the rock -the question, the project - is discussed in the hallways, or how it is referred to in meetings, in documents, in student feedback, in colleague feedback or by other disciplines.
4) Briefly describe what is difficult or murky, thorny or seemingly intractable about the rock -the question, the project.
5) Briefly describe, as best you can at this juncture, what you need to learn.

Rock Criteria

Each rock must meet the following criteria:

1) It should be related to or involve in some way a student pathway that crosses disciplines or areas of the college, and it should involve collaboration with other faculty (including some outside the discipline), staff, and/or administrators. Some of these participants should be outside the discipline and should include rock group members as well as consultants.
2) It should involve the direct study of and engagement with Chabot students and/or their work.
3) It should have direct bearing on student learning.
4) It should involve the collection of evidence - data, student input (surveys, focus groups, interviews, ...), student work (portfolios, exam answers, projects, computer programs, essays, ...), research, assignments, and/or classroom practices.
5) It should analyze the evidence. In other words, it should involve assessment of the work involved in the project. Assessment strategies and instruments need to be articulated in the initial design.

Rock Inquiry Design

Describe in some detail your project and the activities you will conduct. Be sure to refer to the following: taskforce participants, related boulders, potential consultants, tools/instruments to be used and/or created, timeline, evidence and/or data that will be accumulated, assessment strategies to be used for verification and drawing credible conclusions, resources/support needed to perform inquiry.

We strongly recommend that you design a significant learning experience that you can then share with the rest of the college. The role of the community is to support you so that you can do your work.