 This is a video that I have put together in order to help students understand what we call the QEP, Quality Enhancement Plan, and Fayetteville State University consistent. What their roles in it are, what their faculty members are going to be doing over the next five years, how they fit into it, and what it's really all about. So I'm only going to go over some of the broad outlines of the Quality Enhancement Plan. We're currently undergoing what's called reaccreditation through SAAS, which is a reaccrediting our accreditation agency, and that's an association of schools. They come in, they look over all the different aspects of the Fayetteville State University, and then they determine what things we need to fix, what things we need to do in order to improve student learning. One of the recent things that's been added is you have to have a Quality Enhancement Plan that is designed to improve student learning. And the thing that we decided to focus on this time around was critical thinking. That's where I come in. I am a professor of philosophy here at FSU, and I teach critical thinking classes. I'm a subject matter expert on critical thinking. I was involved in the writing of the Quality Enhancement Plan, so I'm here to talk to you, you students, and also to a lesser extent faculty, about what it is exactly that we're doing so that people know what to tell SAAS people when they come in, but also so that we have a much better understanding of where we're going over the next five to ten years. So the Quality Enhancement Plan that we have in place has this acronym, MEVD, Making Evidence-Based Decisions, and that is really a function of critical thinking. You can tie in other skills that are very closely related like problem solving, sometimes you hear these talks about analytical reasoning, and there are a lot of different ways to try to promote evidence-based decisions. Not all of them necessarily involve critical thinking classes, as a matter of fact what we want to do is to promote critical thinking across the curriculum. We want to involve it in a lot of different classes. And what we have to do, we faculty, here's also the FSU, with you students, is we have to demonstrate that we are actually teaching you how to become evidence-based decision makers, that we're actually improving your performance, your understanding, your abilities in these respects. So one of the things that we should talk about at the start is how are we going to do that? Not only how are we going to promote it, how are we going to put it into the classes, but really when it comes down to it, how are we actually going to demonstrate this? How are we going to prove to outside people that you students are actually making improvements? One of the devices that we're going to be using for this is called, for sure, the CLA. What that really means are CLA performance tasks. And what these are, many of you students have actually been introduced to these at one point or another at this point. A CLA performance task gives you a set of documents which contain a mix of pertinent, irrelevant, and irrelevant. Sometimes you have misleading information on the arguments built into them. You have to compare the documents to each other. You have to exercise quite a few skills using them. And then you're provided with a scenario that you take some sort of position in. And somebody will be making arguments and you yourself will have to assess their arguments, given the evidence that you have from the documents. You'll have to make your own arguments. You'll have to tell about the situation, who should be believed, who shouldn't be believed, things along those lines. For example, one of the CLA's that I designed and I've used in classes and some of you students may actually remember this, involved choosing one prison education policy or another, whether to go from four year liberal arts degrees to two year business degrees. And the goal was to reduce recidivism. And if you actually looked at all the data that was provided, all the documents, and you looked at it carefully, you would realize that actually the four year liberal arts program was a better option. But it was set up in such a way that if you weren't careful, if you weren't a critical thinker, if you weren't making evidence based decisions, you would get misled. So this is a way for us to actually test whether exercise critical thinking abilities. One of the other things on the CLA is it requires you to write essay responses. And there's those essay responses. Not only do you have to make evidence based decisions, you have to put that down on people. You have to explain what the evidence is and why it constitutes good evidence. And if you do a really good response, you actually address possible counter other arguments that people might make. So these are the sort of things that we ought to be teaching you in college. And we were trying to do that. So you will probably see a number of different things coming into your classes. So now we've talked about how we're actually going to measure this, how we're going to assess it. Now the thing to think about as far as the QEP is, how is it going to impact you as a student? Well, one of the main points, one of the main parts, I should say, of the QEP is stumbling over all these aggregates, aren't I? One of the main points of the QEP is faculty development. That means that your professors are actually still learners at the same time. They are learning how to incorporate new ideas and to become better teachers. And there are five different tracks that we're using in this program. That doesn't mean that these are the only ways of teaching critical thinking or of incorporating critical thinking. There are five tracks that are part of our QEP. One of them is what's called reading across the curriculum. Reading is very important to critical thinking because if you're not a good reader, if you're not attentive, if you're not paying attention to what's going on in a story, an narrative, an argument, then you're going to have a very difficult time making any sort of reasonable decisions about it. So reading across the curriculum and incorporating a lot of techniques is one thing that we're going to do. The second one is writing across the curriculum. This is another program that we've had in place here at FSU for a while, and we're going to be adding some new features to it, focusing very, very closely on critical thinking, which means we're focusing very closely on a particular kind of writing, writing to make arguments, writing to assess evidence, writing to incorporate information sources. That is all part of making evidence-based decisions. So reading across the curriculum, writing across the curriculum. The third one that we're going to be doing is integrating course design. Now we have actually done some of this before with our faculty development seminar, and we're going to be doing it through online courses, some of which our faculty have already been experimenting with. Integrated course design means that what we're doing is we're looking at the course that you're taking as a student as a whole, and we're trying to figure out how to design it so that we're maximizing your involvement, your engagement with the subject material. How do we reinforce the things that you're learning? How do we give you more and more opportunities to bring things together, to synthesize things? And again, that's supposed to make you better evidence-based decision makers. If we design our courses well, you'll have more of those aha moments where you see how things fit together. So that's three so far. The fourth one is something tied in with our library. We have a very successful information literacy program. Information literacy ties in directly with this because where is your evidence coming from? Well, your evidence is information. Information literacy means knowing several things. It means knowing how to get information, how to get information that's good for what it is that you're studying, not just, you know, popular sources or unreliable sources but good scholarly sources on it. It involves evaluating information, determining whether the information that you have is actually relevant to your task. It is actually going to be providing you something useful, whether it's misleading, whether there's lies built into it. All sorts of things are a part of information literacy. We have a program with Chestnut Library Fellowship that we've gone through. I went through it myself and I can highly recommend it. In information literacy where we study what are called ACRL standards for information literacy, we incorporate them into our classes. So now we've got four different tracks for our Q and P. The fifth one is what we call CLA in the university. It's based on the CLA in the classroom. Don't mean all that much to you as students unless you've actually encountered CLA performance tasks in your classes. A lot of us professors here at FSU have had some sort of contact with the collegiate learning assessment. We've started using it here at FSU for institutional assessment with the rising juniors and the entering freshmen so we can see whether you're actually developing critical thinking skills. And where are you? How far have you developed them? We need to put more emphasis on these sorts of things. We've been acquiring data about that. Now we're going to be adding a third step in the process. The NED part is going to come in the majors. So in your major courses, you should see some CLA performance tasks. You're going to see these evidence-based problems that you have to solve. You're going to do the number of them. Before you graduate, you're actually going to have to take some sort of CLA-based exam, senior exit exam. That is also going to be part of our QDP. Now all these things tie in together and they're all supposed to reinforce each other. The whole goal is to improve your educational experience here at FSU by focusing on what matters absolutely the most. Critical thinking, problem solving, analytical reasoning and also some of the component things like reading and writing. You notice I'm not talking about things like having a good time, the college experience in that sense. Why not? Well because that's already happening at FSU. We really want you to graduate from here with a solid sense of how to make it harder, how to take a position, how to provide evidence, how to provide good evidence. Not just saying, well I feel that this or that, but to say, well here is what the information shows. Let me articulate it for you. That's what we want for you. That's the educational experience we want you to come out of here having, you know, had many opportunities to do. That is where quality enhancement plan is about and that is what SACs is going to be looking at us this coming week. To see whether we can actually pull it off. We have roughly five years to do it. You're going to see step by step these things getting put in place. So you're going to see a lot of interesting, engaging changes happening over the next several years in your curriculum. And you're going to see people walking around with these name tags or badges saying NEBD. That means making evidence based decisions. That is what our QVP basically focuses on. So I hope that this has been helpful for you. If you have questions about this, you can email me at gsabler at uncfsu.edu. You can get some further information. If there's some need for follow-ups on this, I will post additional YouTube videos. And there we go. I think this is a great program. I think that this is really going to improve education at FSU. And I hope that you students will engage with it and find it useful. I hope that you faculty that are watching this will take the opportunity to get involved with this because I think this is a really great plan.