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This is an article I wrote for issue 13 of the Loquitur. It is on how colleges use survey results such as the NSSE to determine what they need to do to better the college.
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Y O U S P E A K , W E L I S T E N C A B R I N I C O L L E G E
Radnor, Pa. Vol L, Issue 17www.theloquitur.com
Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009
Pacemaker Winner
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Vol LI, Issue 21
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Hundreds of thousands of people rallied at the National Mall in
Washington D.C. on Sunday, March 21 in support of comprehensive
immigration reform.
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president,” Norton said to the group.
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support for an overhaul of immigration legislation.
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and “No human can be illegal” at the rally.
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change and have traveled so far to stand up for their rights,” Garrett said.
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ERIC GIBBLEASST. NEWS EDITOR
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American Cancer Society. Young and old, students
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the force cancer had on their lives and the impact
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eliminated from our community,” Katie Keller,
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years ago. “You almost have to change your life in
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the Society are present during the event to oversee
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Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010
Radnor, Pa. www.theloquitur.com Vol. LII, Issue 13
INSIDE
Irresponsibility the issue, not Four LokoSee PERSPECTIVES, page 6
Cabrini student identifies victims of slaverySee FEATURES, page 9
Ultimate guide for this year’s Christmas shopping See A&E, page 10-11
Swim team finds success in tri-meetSee SPORTS, page 16
Haiti’s stability in question one year after earthquakehaItI’S
StrugglE CoNtINuES
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a retired auxiliary bish-op of the Detroit Archdiocese, works to rebuild Haiti in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake.
In less than a minute, the lives of the Haitian people were turned upside down due to a tragic earthquake, with nearly a quarter million dead in an instant and 1.6 million homeless. Elev-en months later, the country still finds itself struggling for stabil-ity.
Since then, little progress has been made to clean up the rubble.
On Sunday, Nov. 28, Haiti tried to elect new leaders. But ac-cording to the latest reports, no clear winner has yet emerged for president. Wide-spread problems in voting occurred, as might be expected, but international ob-servers say the election is still valid.
Recently, the country has ex-perienced a severe outbreak of cholera. The challenge for relief agencies has been enormous and basic relief work continues to-day.
The outbreak of the disease, an infection of the small intestine that causes life-threatening diar-rhea, has affected 15,000 people, about 1,500 of whom have died.
“Our long-term strategy to better the lives of the Haitians is to ensure access to appropriate water and sanitation facilities,” Dennis Warner, Catholic Relief Services senior technical adviser for water and sanitation, said at a conference held at Villanova University on Nov. 8.
Warner’s plans include elimi-nating the contaminated water supply and educating the people
on good sanitation practices.
CRS and other nongovern-mental organizations are hard at work improving the sanitation facilities in Port-au-Prince, the capital and site of the earthquake.
In addition to the cholera out-break, the rest of Haiti hangs in the balance.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Eighty percent of people live on less than $2 a day. Poverty, because of the earthquake, has become more severe. The challenges for the relief agencies for immediate effort remain crucial. A recent di-saster, burying Haiti even deeper into poverty and instabil-ity, was the Nov. 5 hur-ricane.
H u r r i -cane Tomas struck Haiti, f l o o d i n g camps and chasing Hai-tian people from their temporary homes. Families brought their belong-ings through thigh-high water to get to higher ground. The hurri-cane hit Leogane, a town west of Port-au-Prince.
The hurricane took four lives and left two people missing in the town.
The immediate hope citizens had for stabilizing their country was the November elections.
Some of the major candidates in Haiti’s presidential election
CHOLERA, Page 3
By Justin Sillner
Features Editor
Dennis Warner, CRS technical adviser.
Colleges, including Cabrini, create slogans to highlight the unique education that they be-lieve they offer. “Do Something Extraordinary” and “Justice Mat-ters” are just two of Cabrini’s claims.
In the higher education field, these aspects beyond the delivery of courses are known as the “val-ue-added” portion of the college experience.
These claims refer to how much a student has gained, achieved or been enhanced by educational experiences. The ar-eas that may be enhanced include
knowledge, skills and abilities.“At Cabrini we have signifi-
cant ‘value added’ elements that help distinguish us from all other institutions—chief among them, our very unique Justice Matters
Curriculum, which is rooted in Catholic Social Teaching and our Cabrinian heritage,” Dr. Anne Skleder, provost and vice presi-dent of academic affairs, said.
“It informs what is taught in the classroom and transformative
experiences students have out-side the classroom—for example our partnerships in Norristown and in Swaziland—and they then take into their careers and their lives after graduation,” Skleder
said.According to Skleder, insti-
tutions may be evaluated or as-sessed on the basis of the cumu-lative value that they add to their students and some argue that the status of an institution should be
judged by their “value-added” contribution. Of course, “value-added” is difficult to calculate.
“Right now we are working on measuring our impact on stu-dents’ understanding of social justice,” Skleder said. “There are no measures, and through work with a national group called The Wabash Study, Dr. Gingerich and the faculty are developing a way to measure this that other schools may use in the future.”
According to the Wabash Study webpage, the study is a three-year project designed to create a deliberative process for using evidence that an institution can build on for improvements in
EDUCATION, Page 3
Education is now more than just academics for colleges across USBy Danielle Alio
Deputy Editor
johanna Bberrigan / submitted photo
“Right now we are working on measuring our impact on students’ understanding of social justice.”
Thursday, Dec. 2, 2010 The Loquitur 3 News
“Value-added” education aims to improve students’ education outside the classroom
Cell phones continue to distract drivers
“We will be there for them for years,” CRS president says on Haitian development
On the road, a driver glances down for a split second to an-swer a text message. The next moment, they find themselves colliding head-on with another driver in the oncoming lane. This is the reality for 5,000 driv-ers who are killed each year due to distractions in their cars.
Distracted driving is becom-ing a national epidemic. With the increasing prominence of smart phones and other gadgets in cars, drivers are increasingly busy on the roads.
Defined as “any non-driving activity a person engages in that has the potential to distract him or her from the primary task of driving and increase the risk of crashing,” distracted driving is increasing at a rapid rate
“An important takeaway is that distracted driving has been a single check-off on most po-lice reports and could include texting, calling on a cellphone, drowsiness, eating food, playing with the radio, GPS, reading a map, talking to other passengers, so it has been hard statistically to break out by category,” Rick Remington, manager of public and government affairs at AAA Mid-Atlantic, said. “In addition, drivers who survive accidents are not likely to admit to a police officer that they were texting or calling on their cell phone.”
The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety recently issued “grades” to all states based on safe driving laws.
Pennsylvania was given a “red light” due to a lack of laws that keep drivers safe on the roads. When a state is given the “red light” it shows that the state is not doing much in terms of safe driving laws that limit cell phones and other devices while driving.
New Jersey was given a “green light,” meaning that they are sufficiently fulfilling the safe driving laws recommended by The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. Despite laws that were recently put into place ban-ning cell phones in cars, drivers are still using their phones.
“One interesting statistic that has emerged from N.J. is that po-lice there are issuing 10,000 tick-ets per month for cell phone use while driving which is banned in the state,” Remington said.
The teenage and college-aged population also have a higher rate of distractions in their cars.
An August 2010 survey of teen drivers concluded that 60 percent have talked on a cell phone while driving and 28 per-cent have texted while driving. These teens have sent 28 texts while driving within a month. Of all surveyed, 36 percent believe that they have been involved in a near crash due to their own or other’s distracted driving.
By Meghan McSloy
Copy Editor
EDUCATION, Page 1
student learning. There are cur-rently 30 colleges and univer-sities participating in the 2010 study.
Institutions use the study to measure a certain aspect of their education. David Glenn wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Edu-cation that some institutions are using the study to measure the effects of their senior capstone courses, effectiveness of student help centers on campus and stu-dent research and writing skills.
The National Survey of Stu-dent Advancement (NSSE) is another way that colleges and universities collect data about student advancement through a
variety of categories known as “benchmarks.”
NSSE is administered to stu-dents on the freshman and senior level. There are five benchmarks in total composed of 41 subcat-egories. Cabrini students have scored well in comparison with scores of students at more than 700 colleges and universities in several categories, according to the 2008 survey.
“While most popular college rankings are based primarily on measures of resources and repu-tation that research studies indi-cate are not related to learning and personal development out-comes, NSSE results are deter-mined by the students and not by external organizations rating or
assessing colleges and universi-ties,” Lisa Plummer, Director of Institutional Effectiveness, said.
After the college receives the results from a survey such as the NSSE, one may wonder what is done with the results.
According to Media Rela-tions Manager Dan DiPrinzio, the college includes results when applicable from surveys in pub-lications as well as in press re-leases and posted on the college website.
“Once results have been inter-preted, the Office of Institutional Effectiveness presents the find-ings to campus leadership and faculty for meaningful discus-sion,” Plummer said. “Cabrini employs multiple means of as-
sessment (i.e. surveys, focus groups, etc.,) both for improve-ment and accountability. It is from these multiple means that campus decisions are made and improvements occur.”
According to Plummer, one change that has occurred as a re-sult of multiple assessments, fo-cus groups and campus polls was the revamping of Rooymans Hall as a student center.
See the graphic above to see what categories Cabrini students have been recorded to have done well according to an email sent by Plummer. However, the actual data is not available for Loquitur to examine.
CHOLERA, Page 1
had requested to call it off before the polls closed. Haitian residents protested the election. More than 9,000 UN peacekeepers helped pa-trol the streets to ensure security but chaos still broke out.
Residents claimed to not know the location of the polling stations where their names are registered.
Many of the residents came to fulfill their rights as a citizen to vote but were unable to vote be-cause their names did not show up on the electoral list.
There is a lack of a winner among the 18 candidates but an elec-tion between the top two candidates is expected in
January.CRS is one of the
largest non-profit orga-nizations on the ground in Haiti and has raised a significant amount of money towards develop-ing the unstable country.
However, Ken Hack-ett, president of CRS, said it is not how quickly you spend the money that matters but how smart you spend it.
“Spending money smart is the best thing to do,” Hackett said at the conference held at Vil-lanova University. “We [CRS] were there with them through the earth-quake. We will be there for them for the years and years to come for their development.”
