Two campus groups responsible for evaluating the university’s academic environment have combined forces in an effort to better evaluate the speaking abilities of students.

A subcommittee of the Council on Academic Affairs, at the request of the Committee for the Assessment of Student Learning, is asking individual departments to compile statistics on how they evaluate the speech of students in non-general education classes.

The subcommittee requested the evaluations because little is known about what speaking activities students participate in between their required introductory speech course and their required senior seminar course, which includes a speaking component.

Mary Herrington-Perry, assistant vice president for academic affairs and ex officio member of CAA, said the responses that the subcommittee receives will be used in making recommendations for the Speaking Across the Curriculum initiative, which CASL brought before the CAA last spring.

“What CAA is essentially trying to do is interface with the Committee for the Assessment of Student Learning,” Herrington-Perry said.

To interface with CASL, the subcommittee must first interact with the individual academic departments. The subcommittee has created a Web site to achieve that goal. At www.eiu.edu/~acaffair/speaking/ faculty members can find definitions of what the various speaking activities are and instructions on how to complete a spreadsheet that will log the departments’ involvement in the evaluation of student speech.

There are 15 different speaking activities of which some can be done individually, some can be done in groups and others can be done outside of the classroom, according to the Web site.

The spreadsheet breaks down if and how each department assigns and evaluates each of the 15 speaking activities. The departments would list each non-general education course they offer and then note which of the activities take place and whether or not they are assessed. The spreadsheet also allows departments to note whether other activities, beyond the 15, are offered in a course.

Herrington-Perry said the subcommittee wants to see what speaking activities are already in place before moving forward on the Speaking Across the Curriculum Initiative. The initiative is intended to create a better assessment of a student’s speaking abilities with emphasis on courses that fall between Speech 1310 and senior seminars.

The departmental audits are due Feb. 15, 2002, and Herrington-Perry said the subcommittee’s goal is to complete its analysis of those audits by the end of the spring semester. After the analysis is done, the CAA will report back to CASL.

“And then we’ll see what the next step is,” Herrington-Perry said.

The proposal for the Speaking Across the Curriculum initiative that CASL sent to the CAA last February recommends that a speaking component be included in at least three courses in individual majors. To facilitate that recommendation, CASL also recommended that periodic workshops on evaluation of speaking competence be made available to faculty. Classroom sizes of those courses with speaking components would then also be limited so that a 25-to-1 teacher to student ratio exists.

The initiative proposal also suggests that faculty teaching Speech 1310 and 1390 and senior seminars also have the opportunity to attend periodic workshops in order to facilitate consistent evaluation standards.

Lastly, CASL’s proposal also calls for the creation of a campus wide Speaking Across the Curriculum Committee. The committee, which would be under the jurisdiction of the CAA, would assess the speech evaluation process and make periodic reports to the CAA.