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From: James Inverarity
 Subject:  INTERIM FIG REPORT

Here is the interim report of the ACC committee on figs. 

1)     In addition to the text of the interim report of the ACC Ad Hoc Committee on FIGs there are  two excel files.   

2)     The first lists all seminar leaders and their affiliations and the years they taught. 

3)     The second lists all GUR courses and instructors involved in the program.

I hope this report is informative and look forward to receiving further   recommendations from ACC about how we should proceed this quarter.  We are meeting with Kris Bulcroft next Thursday and hope to spend the next three weeks doing focus groups.

 

Interim Report of the ACC Ad Hoc Committee

on Freshman Interest Groups

James M. Inverarity, chair, Lauren Balisky, Lorraine Brilla, Kathleen Kennedy, Jeffrey Newcomer

April 1, 2005

During winter quarter the committee gathered information to address the questions posed by the ACC's charge.    The following summarizes some preliminary findings and outlines the proposed work of the committee in the next several weeks.  We intend to complete our work by May 17 to ensure that the ACC will have a final report in hand for its last meeting on May 24.

BACKGROUND

Origin  of FIGS Program

The program emerged from a  report issued in 1998 by the Provost's task force on deficiencies in the first year experience.    Drawing on program designs found in a half dozen other universities the Western’s contained the following elements:

Goals of the program

In addressing quality concerns the program has simultaneously pursued a variety of goals:

 

·       Provide a seminar experience (with a 25 maximum enrollment)  in the fall quarter

·       Link two GUR courses to give a more coherent interdisciplinary focus

·       Provide orientation to Western and the university experience

·       Cultivate personal networks centered around a  learning community culture

·       Provide residential units for a limited number of students

 

Structure of the program

·      Two credit A/F seminar

·      Linked to two GUR courses

·      Seminars drawn in part from non non-faculty personnel to minimize cost


 

Evolution of the FIGs program

From 1999 to 2004  the program has offered 83 seminars  run by 38 facilitators.

Thirty-six GUR courses have been involved initially as clusters.  In the fall of 2004 the FIG seminars were tied to single GUR courses.  There seems to be a general consensus that this change was deleterious, either because of the loss of the interdisciplinary component or because the small group emphasis gave way to large class sessions.  The 2005 schedule will return to the course cluster plan.

Another major change in 2004 was the direction of the program undertaken by Prof. Lapansky, who has been instrumental in expanding faculty involvement in the program.


 

                                    ASSESSMENTS OF THE PROGRAM

Several  assessment measures have been employed.  The two measures most prominent in the prior literature and the current program’s promotional literature are  GPA  and retention rates.  

Estimating the program's effects on GPA and retention rates is difficult for several reasons:

(1)  Appropriate time frame is for comparisons is unclear.  The program is promoted on the basis of long-term effects improving student adjustment and successful completion of degree.  The reported measures are short-term, limited to comparisons within the first year. 

(2)   Because students are not randomly assigned to  FIGs  drawing conclusions from group comparisons is risky. While it is tempting to view the two groups as treatment and control groups, students self-select into the FIGs program creating non-equivalent comparison groups.  One clear basis of self-selection is gender.  In 1999 65% of the FIG participants were women, whereas 58% of the freshmen were women.  In 2004 71% of FIG participants were women, who constituted 56% of the non-FIG freshmen.  The gender gap may explain a  substantial part of any GPA differences between the two groups.  We hope to explore these issues with more refined analysis of existing data.

 (3)  Because the program combines several diverse elements and not all FIG students in the program are exposed to all the elements, the outcome measures will necessarily be ambiguous.

Trends in GPA
 

The following compares one year cumulative freshman year  GPAs for FIG and non-FIG students for three years 2001-2003.   Differences between groups in each year are small but statistically significant (i.e., not attributable to chance). 

                      2001               2002          2003

The largest differences at the end of the freshman year  (0.10) appear in 2001 and 2003.   These differences are consistent with the hypothesized positive impact. 

Among FIG students it is also possible to compare grades in the GUR courses relative to the other course they took the first quarter.

                       20001       2002          2003         2004

Gaps between GPAs in the FIGs GURs and other courses taken during the quarter substantially increase in the past two years.  This is especially odd given the general sense that the 2004 experiment failed to live up to expectations.

Trends in Retention

               2001            2002             2003
The reported retention rates index students returning to Western after the freshman year.  Retention rates, like GPAs, are complex measures.  Note that we do not have information about long term effects (percent graduating, time-to-completion-of-degree, etc.)  These limited data for three years do not strongly support the hypothesis that FIG experience increases retention.


 

 Staffing

Appendix A lists the seminar leaders; Appendix B lists the GUR courses involved in the program.  As indicated by the following table about three fourths of the seminar leaders were drawn from outside the faculty (graduate students and staff with MA degrees).  Seminar leaders have typically  been involved in extensive preparatory work during the summer.

                                           # of sections

Relatively few seminar leaders have taught more than one or two sections.   The high level of instructor turn-over might be an issue for ACC to address.

 

# of sections           # of instructors

Syllabi 

So far we have collected syllabi for nine of the 73 sections.
              
                                                                        Instructor                GURS

2002      American Dream                             Brown, J         psych?            soc?         

2002      Messages from the Jungle                Casto             psych 101       bio 101      

2003      Radical Equations                           Casto              history 103      math  102       

2003      Media Gender Identity                     Bulcroft          journalism 190    soc  260       

2003      Frames of Mind                              Brown, J         psych 101                  anthro  201  

2003      Gender and Communication             Werder          com101        psych 119      

2004      Arts and Hope                                McKinney       Music 105                     

2004      Media, Politics, Civic Engagement   Carlson           Journalism 190                        

2004      Arts and Hope                                Perry              ?    

The content and grading standards are diverse.  We will try to  expand the sample and summarize the variations in our final report.
          

Research Proposed for Spring Quarter

We intend to hold focus groups with several seminar leaders, instructors of GUR courses, and students.  We will use these focus groups to develop a short survey to gain ideas and assessments from a more representative sample of participants.

We will compare FIGs with other courses/programs pursuing similar objectives such as Honors, Academic Success Seminar, proposed first year experience courses


Acknowledgments

Janice Lapansky,  Karen Casto, and Sharon Schmidtz have been extraordinarily generous with their assistance in providing the committee with documents and data.