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COPYRIGHT 2005 College Reading and Learning Association
This article describes the developments in the assessment journey of a tutoring academic support program in a community college. The goal of our study was to determine if the Learning Center was doing what it said it was doing and what it could do to improve its services. Traditionally, the center had been evaluated on such accomplishments as serving a growing number of students. In this study, the Learning Center made a significant shift to assessment in terms of student learning outcomes. This initial process was not without reversals and constraints, as the center reexamined its goals and searched for measures of student learning. While the results confirmed the center was meeting its student learning outcomes, the data and process also stimulated many questions.
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While many academic departments at community colleges are participating in learning outcomes assessment, fewer academic support programs such as learning centers are rigorously involved in assessment and evaluation efforts. Traditionally, goals and outcomes of academic support centers have been based on what the program or center will do, not what students will be able to do after having received services, and evaluations have often been anecdotal or limited to small samples of students. However, at a time of shrinking budgets, growing enrollments, and changing student demographics, we can no longer assume that we are meeting students' needs. As part of the learning-centered mission of the college, we at the Learning Center reexamined the effects of our tutorial services in order to establish the "value of what we do" (Boylan & Bonham, 2003).
The Learning Center (LC), based in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, offers academic support primarily in the form of free-of-charge tutoring to all full- and part-time college-credit and developmental students. Similar to many community college learning assistance centers (Perin, 2004), our tutoring services include one-on-one appointment tutoring, walk-ins, study groups, Supplemental Instruction (SI), distance (e-mail and telephone) tutoring, computer-aided instruction, and learning strategies development. Tutoring is generally provided for developmental, introductory and general education courses rather than for program or upper-level courses. Student participation in tutoring is voluntary; no tutoring is required, for example, as a component of, or as an alternative to, developmental courses, and we neither teach nor house developmental courses in our center. In 2003-04 the center served 1,780 unduplicated students, approximately 20% of credit enrollment at the college. College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) Tutor Certification is required of all of our peer and professional tutors.
We fully acknowledge that students do not matriculate at our institution or at any community college to come to the LC or to seek tutoring. Rather, students matriculate to gain the content and skills that will improve or enhance their lives academically, professionally, and personally. The measure of the LC's success, therefore, is how well learning center staff, working closely with the faculty, support students in meeting their desired content and skills goals. If tutored...
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