Quality Enhancement Plan Survey Comparison of First-year Students and Graduating Students from Fall 2016 The purpose of this survey was to gauge student beliefs and attitudes related to the goals of Appalachian’s Quality Enhancement Plan. First-year freshmen were surveyed in the fall of the 2016-17. These students were invited to participate shortly after the beginning of the fall semester. As an incentive respondents were entered into a drawing for one of three $75 Amazon gift cards. Of the 3136 first-year students invited to participate 2234 (71%) completed the online questionnaire. Graduating students were invited to participate in the survey during the latter part of the fall semester before they graduated in December. The survey was adapted from one used in a project sponsored by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) titled Liberal Education and Global Citizenship: The Art of Democracy. In that project it was used by participating higher educational institutions to measure the effect of globallyfocused courses on students at their campuses. The composition of the subscales and their descriptions were taken from an unpublished report by Heather Wathington, the project evaluator, provided by staff at AAC&U. The QEP Survey subscales were submitted to factor analysis to determine if the instrument could be simplified into a smaller number of scales that might more clearly measure the goals of the QEP. Table 1 shows how the subscales grouped together into three scales: Competence, Citizenship, and Action. Table 1. QEP Survey Scales and their Subscales Competence Attitudinal Complexity Pluralistic Orientation Social Self-confidence Multicultural Competency Awareness Interest in Current and Global Issues
Citizenship Social Awareness Valuing Social Action Self-efficacy for Social Change Concern for Public Good
Action Active Political Awareness Speaking Up and Acting Out Civic Engagement
Openness to Engagement
The Competence scale reflects students’ degree of attainment of the second of three goals of the QEP, “Cultivate intercultural competence.” The Citizenship scale resonates with the third goal of the QEP “Foster globally competent citizenship.” Though the Action scale does not coincide with any of the three QEP goals it indicates the likelihood of students’ acting on their beliefs and attitudes. A comparison of the mean scale scores of first-year students and graduating students from Fall 2016 is shown in Table 2. Graduating seniors mean scores on the three scales were all greater than the firstyear student mean scores. The differences were all statistically significant but only on the scale representing the cultivation of intercultural competencies could the difference be considered practically significant as represented by an effect size of .65.
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Table 2. A comparison of Fall 2016 First-year Student and Graduating Students
