Student Services
A Little History
After Instruction, Student Services has the longest history of working with SLOs on campus. It began its efforts in the mid-2000's. Those departments that felt they most directly contributed to student learning (the Student Affairs Office, EOPS, Cabrillo Advancement Program, Financial Aid and the Transfer Center) wrote SLOs and began to assess them. Other departments, which saw their contribution to student success as more indirect, adopted the model being used in Adminstration at the time. They did not write SLOs, but instead made plans to assess their services by querying their users about how they could improve.
The college's 2007 Accreditation Site visit resulted in a recommendation for Student Services to strengthen its SLO efforts. "The team recommends that Student Services develop and implement student learning outcomes and measurements for all its departments, collect and analyze the data, and link the results to planning and program improvement.“
Student Services embraced the spirit of the accrediting recommendation by providing a day of training to write SLOs in 2008. Led by the Vice President of Student Services at the time, departments were instructed to write four SLOs, tying them to each of the college core competencies. All departments in Student Services wrote SLOs at this workshop. Some departments also made plans for how to assess those SLOs.
Yet when that assesment began, some departments experienced difficulty. Linking the departmental SLOs to the Core 4 didn’t actually capture the learning that students experienced when using their services. Rather, the SLOs described the work that the department did in support of the skills described by the core competencies. When assessed, the SLOs didn’t actually provide direction in how to better support and strengthen student learning.
As a way of offering assistance, Cabrillo received a Bridging Research, Information and Culture technical assistance grant from the Research and Planning Group of California, funded by the Hewlett Foundation, in 2010. This grant provided Cabrillo with 150 hours of technical support and expertise from statewide experts in research, assessment, and planning. After first meeting with the technical assistance team in Fall 2010, student services departments rewrote their SLOs to focus on what students could do or had learned as a result of working with that department. In addition, they made plans for how they would assess these new SLOs.
In Spring 2011, BRIC technical assistance team member Dr. Julianna Barnes, Vice President of Student Services at Cuyamaca College and a highly regarded expert in student services SLO assessment, held an all-day workshop at Cabrillo where she met with each student services department. During those meetings she looked at their rewritten SLOs and discussed the plans the departments had made to assess them. This technical assistance enabled Student Services to take giant strides in the assessment of their SLOs.
In keeping with Cabrillo’s assessment philosophy, Student Services has integrated SLO assessment with program planning. In 2011-2012, most departments in Student Services completed program plans and assessed their SLOs. The few departments that didn’t complete program plans will complete them in 2013, but every SLO was assessed.
Current Efforts
Now that this initial phase of SLO assessment is complete, departments will embark on a six- year program planning cycle that includes SLO assessment and an annual report due each spring, (see calendar posted on the Vice President of Student Services' website).
Student Services has also standardized its required program planning elements and developed a template (on the left side of the link) for those plans. This template better integrates SLO assessment results with program planning goals and budgetary recommendations.
The website of the Vice President of Student Services Office is the source for:
- Downloadable copies of
- the Program Planning Template
- the Annual Report form
- SLO/AUO assessment analysis forms
- Individual departmental
- Program Plans
- SLO/AUO Assessment Analysis results
- Annual Reports