What’s a QEP? What is supplemental instruction and what are bottlenecks? Don’t worry: We’ll explain what you need to know about UA’s current quality enhancement plan in just five points.
1. It’s about quality.
QEP stands for Quality Enhancement Plan, which is an initiative that a university undertakes to improve outcomes during a specified accreditation period. UA’s strategic goals include delivering a premier, transformational education and creating a welcoming campus for all students, and the current QEP is designed to help meet those goals. It’s about driving educational quality and making students of all backgrounds feel invested and welcomed. “So the stakes,” said Dr. Teranda Donatto, QEP director, “are very, very high.”
2. It’s about breaking bottlenecks.
College is hard, and students need wins. So in select courses with high enrollment and high rates of students dropping, failing or withdrawing, or “bottleneck courses,” UA’s current QEP introduces a new peer-led supplemental instruction, or SI, program. This means that students who have previously been successful in the course or its content equivalent can now become SI leaders, helping other students succeed in the course. These SI leaders attend the class meetings with students and take notes, then hold supplemental instruction sessions outside of regular class times to benefit students.
3. It has a proven track record.
Supplemental instruction has existed since the early 1970s, explained Supplemental Instruction Program Manager Kim Vann. Researchers have noted that in addition to helping students master difficult course content, boost academic skills and earn higher grades in challenging courses, SI can encourage a greater sense of belonging among students, leading to higher retention. It also has a proven record of helping underprepared or historically underrepresented students.
4. It benefits both learners and leaders.
Vann leads SI leaders through a training program that includes scenarios they might encounter with students in sessions. She also has them create activity plans for these sessions to keep students engaged. This kind of experience can be invaluable for the future, not only in teaching experience or relationships with professors, but in building empathy, patience, creativity, and skills in public speaking. Not to mention resilience. “It’s not something you can do and just play by the books because you could have a plan that’s set for 20 people to be there and two people show up,” Vann said. “So you’ve got to adjust really quickly. And the ones who do it well are kind of amazing to me.”
5. It’s a five-year project.
The QEP has five years to show progress, first in retention for the bottleneck courses. Donatto and Vann hope to see improvement in pass rates and reduction in the number of students who fail and need to repeat the course. Additionally, researcher Joan Barth from the Institute of Social Science Research is helping to develop a pre/post-survey about how students’ sense of belonging to the University changes because of the program.