In the reflective essays and on-line portfolio, we believe that UC Davis has demonstrated the core capacities that are prerequisite to our educational effectiveness review. From ramping up our advising activities to accommodate the Tidal Wave II students to refining our program review processes, we have been committed to improving the learning-centered environment at our institution.

In our Institutional Proposal dated June 14, 2000, we stated:

Three general goals can be mentioned first. UC Davis is looking forward to the opportunity to engage the campus more broadly in the review process through the capacity review. We are particularly interested in developing educational objectives for the integration of teaching, learning, and research. Given the enrollment growth and faculty turnover we anticipate, we are eager to develop strategies to consistently communicate our campus priorities as articulated in our mission statement and academic planning documents.

As we have noted in the introductory essay, the Chancellor's Fall Conference on Undergraduate Education, held in the fall of 2001, set the stage for a yearlong set of activities that engaged the campus in the review process. We have offered more specific information on how we used it as an opportunity to develop educational objectives, but we also used this conference to stimulate discussions on first year experiences, campus honors programs, General Education, assessment, educational technology, and campus composition requirements. Although many members of the campus community were already convinced that the formation of an Academic Senate Undergraduate Council would mark an important step towards improved undergraduate education decision making, the myriad of issues and recommendations that surfaced at the conference further reinforced the need for a body charged with pursuing proactive courses of action on behalf of the undergraduate curriculum. With the formation of the new Undergraduate Council, as well as continued attention by the administration, we are confident that these will be on-going discussions that will outlast the WASC review process.

We have succeeded in our goal of establishing Educational Objectives for the campus. In the coming academic year, we will continue our extensive efforts to publicize and distribute them. We recognize that much more needs to be done to make them operational. Both the Senate's Undergraduate Council and the administration are committed to developing functional metrics for them, and they will be key in any upcoming strategic planning process.

We make effective use of the campus communication tools available to us. Even more so than was the case in 2000, when we submitted our proposal, campus stakeholders rely on the Internet to receive information. We also reinforce our messages with hard copies of directives, both student and staff/faculty publications, and plain old-fashioned word of mouth. In our Educational Effectiveness review we will more thoroughly discuss the ever-increasing role our MyUCDavis portal plays in campus communication.

For our Educational Effectiveness review, the UC Davis institutional proposal states that:

Regarding our inquiry into research, we would like to be able to provide our faculty with best practices for integrating research into the student learning experience. We are also interested in developing more specific student research goals for the ten academic initiatives recently developed for the campus. We intend, thereby, to gain a clearer picture of ourselves that will, in turn, help us to articulate to various audiences what it means to be a research university and the way in which the research component of our mission benefits our students, their parents, and other constituencies.

Our preliminary data collecting would suggest that many members of our faculty are already quite aware of, and in some instances the architects of, best practices for integrating research into undergraduate learning experiences. We have learned just how discipline-specific discussions of undergraduate research must be. We have benefited from participation in discussions sponsored by The Reinvention Center at State University of New York, Stony Brook, on undergraduate research. At UC Davis and elsewhere, students in the humanities and fine arts often characterize research as something done by their colleagues in the sciences. A key component of the advising process we describe in the Standard 2 essay now involves familiarizing students with the range of opportunities for creative work, scholarship, and research at UC Davis. Our ten academic initiatives are at various stages of maturity, and the fiscal constraints we have discussed have forced some of them to slow down a bit. Thus we believe it best to identify student research goals for those that are the most fully developed. As part of our 2000-2001 student survey, we asked students for narrative comments on their views of the benefits of attending a research university. The results have prompted interesting campus discussions, and we will elaborate on them in the next stage of this process.

Given the State's increasingly precarious fiscal situation, it is more important than ever that we use our resources for educational technology judiciously. In our Institutional Proposal we state:

...we want to ensure that sound pedagogical and intellectual practices drive the deployment of technology, rather than letting the availability and seductiveness of new technologies drive our endeavors. At the end of this WASC accreditation process we would like to have criteria that will help the campus departments and programs reach informed decisions about the use technology in instruction. Additionally, we would like to have an improved sense of how best to enable us and our students to develop the new literacies required by the digital age.

In our discussion of Standard 3, we have documented our ability to pull together key groups to grapple with specific tasks on campus. In our Educational Effectiveness review, we will more fully demonstrate how we have used this to our benefit with the formations of the computing coordinating committees, Administrative Computing Coordinating Council (AC3) and Academic Computing Coordinating Council (AC4).

Since members of our campus team attended the first workshop relevant to the reaffirmation of accreditation in July of 1999, we have learned a great deal about our University. For a campus such as ours, where persistent enrollment growth and a deteriorating fiscal outlook can govern day-to-day decision making, the WASC process forces us into a more analytical mode. As we have inventoried campus practices, we have had moments where we were pleasantly surprised by a particular major's commitment to our educational objectives. While at other times, we've been disappointed and dismayed by some practices. We think that the decision on the International Relations major to require students to have an "international experience" reinforces our educational objective to "Develop a Global Perspective." On the other hand, our objective to "Develop Effective Communication Skills" would seem to be negated by those upper division courses that have diluted paper requirements because the departments can't hire enough teaching assistants. We are impressed by the fact that, overall, our faculty and staff are genuinely committed to providing an academic experience at the very highest intellectual standard possible.

In the immediate day-to-day life of the campus, one easily identifies enrollment growth, budget cuts, and space limitations as the biggest problems. However, from the perspective of the new WASC standards, one might conclude that our biggest challenge lies in fully developing a culture of evidence around student learning. Perhaps because so many of our faculty members are eminent researchers in the "hard" sciences, the campus conversations on "assessment" and "culture of evidence" have been quite lively. In their own laboratories our faculty maintain exacting standards for evidence. As our discussion of Physics 7 indicates, and our Educational Effectiveness review of educational technology will demonstrate, many of our faculty have adopted very sophisticated assessment tools for their courses. If strong evidence emerges that assessment really does result in enhanced learning outcomes, then it is likely that more of our faculty and departments will invest human and financial resources into the deployment of the more sophisticated tools of evidence gathering. At present, many members of the faculty are attentive to the research being conducted.

These changes are likely to coincide with the changes to our course format and structure that are unfolding as faculty embrace and increasingly rely upon educational technology in the delivery of instruction. Most UC Davis faculty who adopt their courses to new technologies rely upon the services of the Teaching Resources Center and Mediaworks. We are fortunate that the faculty directors of these programs are very current on assessment practices and can help faculty include assessment modules in their courses. Indeed, the Educational Effectiveness review will highlight the implementation of a Mellon Grant on assessment of on-line and hybrid on-line General Education courses awarded to Professor Harry Mathews, director of Mediaworks.

Reflections

Each of the five egghead sculptures comments on human interaction. The King Hall and Main Theater pairs offer cautionary notes on human-to-human communication while the solitary Mrak Mall, Shields Library, and North Hall heads emphasize contemplation of human institutions, human knowledge, and the human spirit, respectively. As we strive to improve our institution, it is essential that we remain mindful of all these messages.

Robert Arneson, Yin & Yang, from The Egghead Series, 1991-92, Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection, © UC Regents.