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Criterion Five Team

Paradise Valley Community College
Criteria Five:
Defining and Evaluating Service and Engagement

Ken Clarke & Sherry Adams, co chairs

Introduction

Criterion Five in the new Criteria for Accreditation requires organizations to evaluate and be accountable for their success in serving their consituents. Criterion Five is one of the dramatically new features in the new Criteria.

Scheduled for evaluation in March 2005, Paradise Valley Community College (PVCC) was one of the first institutions to use the new Criteria for its institutional Self-Study process. In this paper, we reflect on the process used at PVCC to gather evidence and prepare a report written to the Core Components in Criterion Five.

Background

Paradise Valley Community College is one of ten colleges, two skill centers, and multiple satellite locations located throughout the metropolitan Phoenix region, that comprise the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD). Each college in the District has its own mission and is separately accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.

PVCC’s mission statement charges the college with providing “life-long learning opportunities” through programs and services that “are continuously evaluated and improved to meet the needs of students, businesses, and the community.” We therefore welcomed service and engagement, in general, as a natural and important piece of a thorough institutional self-study.

Process

Paradise Valley Community College initiated their self-study process with the appointment of a Self-Study Coordinator in Fall 2002, prior to the final approval of the new Criteria. A Steering Committee was assembled. They quickly decided to structure our self-study using the new Criteria and Core Components. The Criterion Five Sub-Committee was co-chaired by Sherry Adams, a faculty member in the Communication and Humanities Division, and Ken Clarke, the Assistant Director of Student Financial Assistance. The co-chairs then selected Dr. Paula Vaughn, the College’s Director of Service-Learning, and eight other faculty members, staff, and administrators for our team.

After reading the new Criterion, we realized we needed to define several terms. One of the first sub-committee meetings was spent trying to define consituents, service, and engagement. It is interesting to note that our definition of constituents differed slightly from the one arrived at by the Criterion One team. We were thinking of the people we serve and interact with, whereas the Criterion One team was simply looking at the groups of people that are explicitly mentioned in the mission documents. Of course, these two lists were not dramatically different, but the discrepancy was one of many challenges we faced.

We then broke our Sub-Committee into four smaller groups to research each separate Core Component. Each group was directed to create a list of the unique programs and services at PVCC that we wanted to highlight. We also began to gather information.

When the entire Sub-Committee reconvened, we realized that our problem was not a lack of evidence, but rather too much to effectively manage! In addition, the core component groups were each separately looking at many of the same programs and services.

Together, we chose the programs that would be representative and provide the best examples of evidence for our College. To avoid overlap, we then disbanded the core component groups and asked our team members to analyze specific programs instead. For each program, the responsible team member was charged with answering three questions:

Below in Table 1 is an example of our Criterion Component Worksheets we developed.

TABLE 1

Indicator (Students)	Example of Evidence
Maintains relationships with feeder schools, service area defined	Recruitment report Statistics concerning demographics of enrollment area Enrollment data (see 5A-1, E; 5A-6) crossover: 5A-4

Indicator (Community members)	Example of Evidence
Silver Sneakers Program, connection with hospital to refer rehab patients?	Year-end report Submitted by Paula Vaughn (see 5A-6) crossover: 5C-1
President’s Circle	List of members Submitted byPaula Vaughn (see 5A-1, D) crossover: 5A-10; 5C-3

In the fall of 2003, we held a campus-wide town-hall forum in which we presented our initial findings, asked for public feedback, and solicited opinions for areas that needed additional information or analysis. After a few more months of analysis, it was time to write our report.

Results

Since the College had committed to using the Core Component structure for the self-study report, we still had the challenge of deciding which programs fit best in each core component. Since we did not have any sample reports to guide us, we decided to analyze the core components with specific attention to their distinctiveness from one another. It will be interesting to review our Consultant/Evaluator Team Report and other self-study reports to see if there is a general agreement with our interpretation of this Criteria.

We decided that the emphasis in Core Component A is on communication avenues with our constituents and the ways in which PVCC decides if they can or cannot respond to a community need or request. Core Component B examines the physical, human, and financial support and the internal processes and programs that the college has in place in order to sustain its ability to engage its constituents. We thought that Core Component C was the appropriate place to examine the variety and depth of the programs, services, and collaborative ventures that the college has established to serve the community and directly respond to identified needs of both internal and external constituents. Core Component D, then, focuses on the specific evaluation processes and feedback loops that PVCC uses to verify that its programs and services are well received and valued by their internal and external constituents.

Some of the featured programs throughout the Criterion include Service-Learning, the Center for Distance Learning, Fine and Performing Arts, the Division of Continuing Education, Learning Connections (a P-20 consortium of local schools and colleges), Student Life, Nursing, Center for International Studies, and SUCCEED/ACE (Students Using Community College to Expand Educational Dreams / Achieving a College Education). The complete report can be found on the College’s Self-Study web site: http://www.pvc.maricopa.edu/~selfstudy

Challenges

Our sub-committee faced several challenges in the course of the self-study process. Several initial members left. One was replaced, but some were not, thus increasing the responsibilities on the remaining team members. The initial information gathering was time consuming and some cases duplicative. Much of the data was interesting and important, but did not impact the final report.

Since we had no sample reports for a guide, we were often unsure if the process we were using and the information we were gathering was “correct” or “what they want to see”. We eventually realized that the initially frustrating ambiguity is deliberate and that these new Criteria are designed so that each college has the freedom to establish their own patterns of evidence. That is, there really is no standard of “correct” and there are no explicit expectations of what an evaluator wants to see. Each college has the responsibility or burden of proof to establish and defend their own definition of service and engagement.

References:
Paradise Valley Community College’s Self-Study web site: http://www.pvc.maricopa.edu/~selfstudy

-October 2003 Forum Presentation in Powerpoint.