OCR Text |
Show O Weber State College SDCMpOSV .58 U U 44 No Friday, June 1, 1984 Yeah! Finals, and then another quarter is over. Good luck on finals and have a great SUMMER!!!! M I ,f A I .vV" 4 ! I : ... f M f' -. -" ' ' f f I W H; I I If j 1 . Ill Vl ;i J, i The Second Annual Crystal Crest Awards Program will be held tomorrow evening in the WSC Browning Center at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $3.50 at the door for students and $5 for general admission. Signpost photoBob George Above, the stage in the Austad Auditorium gets changed for the set of Crystal Crest. Jazz trumpeteer, Al Hirt, will provide entertainment, as will other groups from the WSC campus. Teacher evaluations Signpost To Publish First Summer Paper Students who will be attending summer school this year will find that the Signpost will be published during summer quarter. This is the first time that the Signpost has extended its publication to a full year. The paper will not be published twice a week. Instead, it will be published once .a week on Thursdays. Students, faculty and staff will be able to pick up the Signpost at various locations around campus. Summer school students, having to pay the initial cost of tuition and fees, felt that they were being cheated by not having a summer paper to read. Obviously there are not as many students that enroll in school during the summer as there are during the regular course of the year. There are not any collegiate athletic events that occur during the summer, but the Signpost still feels that there will be plenty of events happening around campus that the paper will be an added benefit to those students that do attend summer school. The Signpost will focus more on the theater and intramurals departments during the summer quarter. The summer paper will also be a benefit to those on the staff, as it will help to break the new staff members in so that fall quarter will start off smoothly. The Signpost has chosen editors for the up-coming school year. Applications for all positions were made available to the studentbody. Rae Dawn Olbert will remain as managing editor. She will work closely with David C. Wright, who has been an investigative reporter for the Signpost. Wright will take over as news editor. Dan Dickson and Steve Spafford will be at the helm of the sports department with Dickson as sports editor and Spafford as his assistant. In the world of entertainment, Chris Larsen will step in as the new editor. Larsen has worked as a reporter, covering both entertainment and news. The person in charge of copy editing and catching all the spelling and grammatical mistakes will be Pam Stoker. The Signpost will continue to use reporters for investigative purposes. Anyone that is interested in writing for the Signpost either summer or next fall quarter, should come to the Signpost office (UB 267), located down the hallway from the bowling alley, and see Colleen Mewing, editor-in-chief. Next year's staff is looking to improve upon the quality of the paper and will continue to provide stories that are in the best interest of the students, faculty and staff of Weber State College. Senate Approves IDEA Program by Stephanie DeGraw Staff Reporter At yesterday's Faculty Senate meeting the the motion to accept a new teacher evaluation program (IDEA) was passed by a 14-11 margin. The IDEA program is to be implemented next year. With much debate, the Faculty Senate finally proposed that the report presented by the Ad Hoc Committee on Documenting Teaching Excellence be accepted.The report is made up of three recommendations. The first recommendation is that data from at least four sources must be used to give significant weight to teacher evaluations. The four sources are student ratings of instruction, peer review of instructional materials, learning outcomes, and self-assessment. The second recommendation is that WSC institute a uniform program of campus-wide student ratings of instruction beginning in the 1984-85 year. A motion was proposed and passed to use this first year as a trial basis. It also states that to provide reliable documentation, each instructor will be evaluated twice during the course of the year. The third recommendation is that the IDEA program, developed by Kansas State University, be used to obtain student ratings of instruction. The data will be used for the evaluation of the instructor's performance and the information from the evaluation will be useful to the instructor in planning for instructional improvement. The Faculty Senate has been researching ways to improve faculty evaluation. Since November, 1983, a senate subcommittee, the Ad Hoc Committee on Documenting Teaching Excellence, has been researching nationwide evaluation and other ways to critique instructors. The committee has chosen the IDEA evaluation. IDEA has a few positive concepts that the member team felt set it apart from the average popularity-type test. First, the instructor lists hisher objectives for the quarter just completed. The evaluation then asks students questions that measure what they've learned. The IDEA test was found to provide the most details for teacher improvement. The test coordinator, Joanne Kurfiss, said, "The test is designed for teachers to see their strengths and weaknesses." Kurfiss, who is also the director of instructional development, said certain aspects of the tests will indicate how effectively students learned in the classsrooms. The test can measure not only what a student feels about the teacher and course material, but also how successfully the student feels he applied himself. For the last few weeks, the ad hoc committee has been testing the evaluation. The IDEA evaluation has been piloted in ten classes so far. Faculty and student reaction has been monitored along with the test results. One student who completed the evaluation said, "This test is quite a bit better than most. It's thorough and made you think." According to Kurfiss, the new IDEA evaluation will be the strong point in ascessing faculty progress. Three other factors in rating instructors include monitoring a teacher's general improvement over the year, a college review by other professors, and the faculty's own self-assessment. |