Standard II:
Reporting
Swarthmore College Education > State Review
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The Director of the Education Program, with the support of the Administrative Assistant, is responsible for collecting and analyzing the data required for the Title II annual and biennial reports. In April 2001, Swarthmore College submitted its first annual Title II report to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.This report documented that students who completed the Swarthmore certification program between September l999 and August 2000 had a 100% pass rate on all of the PRAXIS tests they took: Reading, Writing, Math, Listening, Principles of Learning and Teaching 7-12 and the English, Biology, Math and Social Studies tests. In addition students being certified in Elementary Education in our collaborative program with Eastern College had a 100% pass rate on the Principles of Learning and Teaching K-6 and on the Elementary Education test. The PRAXIS scores for individual students are included in their certification files. The Title II report also included data, broken out into the required categories, regarding the employment status of our graduates. 13 of the 16 students certified in this cohort were employed in teaching positions within or outside of the Commonwealth. (For additional detail, see Appendix C.)
A more comprehensive survey of the employment status of our graduates for the period since our last Major Review and their evaluations of the preparation they received in the Swarthmore teacher certification program was conducted in the summer of 2001. In this questionnaire, we included both Likert type items and open-ended questions that enabled students to respond from their own personal experience. The questionnaire requested information about where and how long graduates have taught, or if they have not taught what they did instead; the strengths and weaknesses of the Education Program courses and practice teaching sequence; questions about the general skills the program provided them; questions about how well-prepared they perceived they were in comparison with other new teachers in their school; and questions about graduate study in Education or another discipline. A report on results of the survey of our graduates is available in Appendix D. In addition, Education Program faculty get substantial feedback on the program and about graduates' initial teaching experiences from a large percentage of our graduates through frequent, informal contacts with a large percentage of our graduates via phone calls, e-mail and return visits to campus, often to use the Educational Materials Center.
In the Education alumni survey we also request the names and addresses of the principals and/or departments chairs in the schools in which the students have taught and then follow-up with a questionnaire to them as well. In this questionnaire, we inquire about strengths and weaknesses of the teacher(s) prepared at Swarthmore and their assessment of our graduates in comparison to other beginning teachers, as well as suggestions for change in our program. The results of the surveys of principals are available in Appendix D. The comprehensive survey of our graduates will be conducted biennially from now on. The principal survey will be conducted every five years.
Once the data from both of the surveys was received and the data was analyzed, the full-time Education faculty met to discuss the results and to consider program modifications. In addition to evaluations from Swarthmore graduates, course evaluations are regularly completed in all of our courses, at least once and often twice during the semester. These surveys provide feedback to individual Education faculty about the strength and weaknesses of their courses. Where courses are taught by more than one faculty member (Education l4 and Education l7), the relevant faculty also discuss student evaluations of these courses. Because Swarthmore undergraduates, with the exception of two individuals, have almost always had a l00% pass rate on all of the PRAXIS since they began to be required in Pennsylvania, we do not have any contingency plans for major program redesign, which would be necessitated by a passing rate of lower than 70%.
