Resolution Requesting a Task Force on Academic Support

Whereas there is a wide diversity of views on the LRCs and other forms of academic support among faculty and administrators that recognizes both the growing need for such support and the increasing difficulty of adapting it to the wide diversity of student needs and the rapid pace of technological change;

Whereas the LRC undertaking and other academic support involve considerable complexity, diversity, and competing forces;

Whereas there is an immediate need for an in-depth, expert evaluation of Rutgers support programs, including the LRCs, now that the LRCs have been in place for roughly a decade;

Whereas there is a need to create a task force on academic support to coordinate such efforts; and

Whereas there is a need to continue the conversation among faculty, academic support service personnel, multipurpose college and university administrators, and students with respect to these issues,

Therefore be it resolved that a committee of faculty, administrators, staff, and students called the Rutgers-New Brunswick Task Force on Academic Support be created with (a) the long-range goal of creating an in-depth, scholarly, policy-oriented report that will provide a blueprint for making Rutgers a national leader in academic support programs, and (b) the short-range goal of continuing the dialogue to deal constructively with identified problems of coordination and effectiveness involving the LRCs.
 

ADDITIONAL ELABORATION OF THE RESOLUTION

The Task Force, which should report to the Vice-President for Undergraduate Affairs, should include undergraduate discipline directors, faculty coordinators of large core courses, faculty and administrators with expertise in design and evaluation of academic support programs, representatives from the LRCs, MSLCs, Writing Centers, EOFs, and other academic support units, plus other appropriate faculty, administrators, staff members, and students.

The majority of its members should be faculty. The Task Force should have its mission supported by a wide variety of resources from the Office of the Vice-President for Academic Affairs, such as the use of advanced graduate students supported by research assistants' funding, research support, and staff support.

Its Long-Range Subcommittee should be responsible for collecting data, compiling reports, and creating and reporting on the results of focus groups on the issues to be studied by those involved in the external review.

That subcommittee would develop program evaluation procedures at a high scholarly level that would enable Rutgers to perform pioneering investigative work in the transferability of skills across disciplines in order to decide how best to tailor the work of LRCs and other units of academic support to the needs of the various departments that use them. If properly devised, the work of the Task Force and the external review would allow Rutgers to play a vital role nationwide in improving the pedagogy of learning resource centers and other forms of academic support and would allow Rutgers to assume leadership by contributing nationally to models of student academic support and retention.

The self-study produced by the Long-Range Subcommittee would serve as a pilot study for the external review and should take place in Spring 2001, with the external review itself being conducted in Fall 2001 and the final report in Spring 2002. It is essential that the Long-Range Subcommittee obtain the research resources it needs from the Rutgers administration, including the support necessary from the Office of Institutional Research, to conduct a review of the pedagogical literature, to compile existing research done at other institutions, and to conduct appropriate research at Rutgers. It is clearly in the interest of the university to assume a leadership role in the field of academic support and retention and to implement the best learning practices at Rutgers as soon as possible.

The Task Force should structure and receive feedback in the form of annual reports from departments on the nature of their relationship with the Learning Resource Centers and other forms of academic support services at Rutgers so that there be an ongoing evaluation of the viability of such relationships and of the success of the learning outcomes.

The Long-Range Subcommittee would be charged with systematically examining the various models currently in place at Rutgers for the functioning of LRCs as they vary according to discipline and college. It also would examine the quality of feedback on student progress and the viability of instructional strategy from the LRCs and other academic support units to faculty and of satisfaction with the communication between faculty and such support personnel.

The Long-Range Subcommittee would consider how best to allocate academic support resources, including space and personnel, at Rutgers. The subcommittee also would address the long-range problems associated with the allocation of fixed resources and with the geography of New Brunswick and would explore alternatives to current instructional practices.

Since we have become increasingly aware of how as a result of new technology the ground underneath us constantly is changing, the Long-Range Subcommittee needs to explore how faculty and academic support personnel best can manage the new technology rather than have it enslave us.

The Short-Range Subcommittee should focus on immediate issues of enhancing coordination and resource allocation among the various academic support units in New Brunswick in order to address problems that need immediate attention.

The subcommittee should explore how best to foster the exchange of information among these units, and between these units and faculty and departments. The subcommittee should examine how best to improve the training of tutors and the optimal nature and level of departmental involvement in such training.

The subcommittee would address immediate problems of space and resource allocation to meet current needs for academic support. The subcommittee also might examine the best relationship between the work performed by Tas and the work performed by tutors provided by academic support units and on a course-by-course basis how students best should be advised to rely on the help of these two types of teaching and support personnel.

In sum, the Rutgers-New Brunswick Task Force on Academic Support should enhance collaboration and effectiveness among those University professionals involved in academic support services. The task force should provide the Rutgers community with the latest available research data on academic support services at other institutions and with the critical tools that would allow us to assess our own strengths and weaknesses in the field of academic support and retention so that we may enhance our strengths and overcome our deficiencies. A rigorous self-study undertaken in conjunction with an external review should provide us with the critical tools to allow Rutgers to assume national leadership in developing the pedagogy essential to success in academic support and retention.