Slippery Rock University MSCHE 2011 Self-Study
Chapter Four
Excellence in Teaching come with stipends for professional travel and research (Appendix L). The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Educational Technology (CETET), established during the 2007-08 academic year, assists faculty in organizing study groups that will help them remain current in their scholarship, to integrate that scholarship into their teaching, and to publish and present at academic conferences. Standard 6-C and G, and Standard 10-C, E and Q Slippery Rock University’s faculty members have the primary responsibility for designing academic programs and the courses within those programs, which must be reviewed by department faculty, department, college, and university-wide curriculum committees, and the Vice-President for Academic Affairs (functioning as representative of the university president). Students, it might be said, “vote with their feet” and the growth in university enrollments over the past decade, even when the population of state and regional high school graduates is in decline, as well as Slippery Rock University’s transformation into a “competitive” admissions institution, may be the main evidence that the above mentioned programs are strong. In five-year program reviews recent graduates cite the instruction they received and the relationships they developed with faculty members as reasons for their overall satisfaction with their Slippery Rock education. A survey of 2006-07 Slippery Rock University graduates, conducted in 2008 by the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College, reported that nearly all of the respondents (97 to 98%) felt the faculty had met or exceeded their expectations regarding knowledge of their fields and concern for the students as individuals (Exhibit 46). Standard 8-E and O, Standard 11-A, and Standard 14-G and NN
Accreditations In performing strategic planning, Slippery Rock University determined that one way to strengthen the value of its degrees and the quality of its academic programs would be to set a goal of achieving accreditation for all professional programs. Achieving this goal would ensure that enrolled students were acquiring proficiency in recognized sets of professional competencies and that SRU’s programs were voluntarily measuring themselves against national standards set for institutions conferring similar degrees and certifications. Since 2005, the university has been steadily gaining new accreditations (e.g. the Doctor of Physical Therapy program was accredited by the American Physical Therapy Association in 2009), maintaining current accreditations, and obtaining reaccreditations (Figure 4.1). Standard 7-A According to the 2010 Accountability Report, the university currently has programs accredited by 16 different professional organizations. These include programs directly related to the institution’s history of preparing educators and service professionals. Programs in secondary-level subject areas have been accredited by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), as have programs in school and community counseling. Programs in nursing, exercise science, athletic training, and social work have all been accredited. In addition, Slippery Rock University’s programs in art, dance, music, and theatre have been accredited by national accrediting associations, making the institution one of only one-quarter of all regional universities that have all their art programs accredited. Standard 6-V, Standard 7-A, and Standard 8-E 60 | P a g e