Kaua‘i community college

Planning Agenda

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  The college will continue to regularly review the structure of program offerings to ensure continued compliance with this standard.
  

II.A.5. Students completing vocational and occupational certificates and degrees demonstrate technical and professional competencies that meet employment and other applicable standards and are prepared for external licensure and certification.
Descriptive Summary
In several programs, students must pass national licensure or certification tests. Students in the Nursing program have to pass the NCLEX licensure exam to qualify for the LPN and RN licenses. In the Auto Mechanics (eight areas) program, students are certified through Student Profile and Automotive Service Excellence (NATEF ASE) tests but students must also gain work experience before being awarded certificates. Some programs are accredited to insure that they meet national and professional standards. The Early Childhood Education Program is accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The Culinary Arts faculty is working toward getting the program accredited by the American Culinary Federation (ACF). Licensure results for Nursing have shown steady improvement over the past few years.

Program	Test	% Of Students Passing 2003	% of Students Passing 2004	% of Students Passing 2005
Nursing – RN	NCLEX - RN	92%	94%	100%

For the Automotive program, the graph indicates that over a period of seven years, the performance of students on the National Automotive Technician Education Foundation (NATEF) exam showed slight improvement in all areas. Improvement in engine, air-conditioning and heat, and electrical has been minimal. Currently, all pass rates are above 70 percent.

Every Career Technical Education (CTE) program has an advisory committee. One of the uses of the committee is to review the program and to make recommendations for industry currency and program improvement (Exhibit II-28: CTE Advisory Committee Meeting minutes).

Self Evaluation

As a result of recommendations from Advisory Committees, the Auto Body, Auto Mechanics, Culinary Arts, Nursing, and Hospitality Services faculty have made changes to their programs (Exhibit I-18: Curriculum Committee Meeting Minutes).

For example, the Culinary program was redesigned in 2003 to meet the needs for short -term training to meet workplace demands and to align the program with the required Student Learning Outcomes for the American Culinary Federation accreditation standards. The business employers wanted specific competencies and the faculty developed a Certificate of Competence for students needing remedial help. This program addresses academic remediation for students that do not qualify for the Associate of Applied Science requirements by including a remedial industrial math component into the program. Also, it offers a career exploration course for students who are unsure of their future career. In the first year of this program, 9 students qualified for the AAS program out of 20 enrolled students (45 percent). In the second year of this program, there were 8 who qualified out of 20 enrolled students (40 percent). The program faculty members are in the process of analyzing data to see if the redesigned program is an improvement in meeting the needs of the students and employers (Food Services Mini-Program Review).

The Nursing program developed a three-year pilot program, the Academy for Future Nurses, under an EPSCOR grant, to address the needs of under-prepared students who wanted to pursue a career in nursing (See Section II.A.1.a). Eighty-eight percent of the Academy’s students received passing scores on the NLN-RN pre-admission test, compared with 55 percent of all other applicants.

UH Program Coordinating Councils for each vocational and professional program have developed horizontal articulation programs that insure that students in common programs meet the same outcomes and competencies throughout the UH System. Since Summer 2004, Carol Pang and Jean Hara from the Office of the Associate Vice President for Academic Planning and Policy, UH Community Colleges, have been meeting with faculty from UH System community colleges from the various programs such as Hospitality and Travel (HOST), Business Technology (BUSN), Information and Computer Science, etc. to articulate and agree on common course alphas, numbers, titles, descriptions, SLOs, etc. This articulation agreement allows students from these programs to seamlessly transfer to the same programs at other UH community colleges (Exhibit II-29: Articulation Agreements and more discussion in Section II.A.6.a.).
The KCC instructors teaching in career and technical areas are exploring the use of valid and reliable standardized tests to measure their students’ learning outcomes. For example, the hospitality program may use the American Hotel and Lodging textbooks which contain standardized final examinations which are graded by the Association. For Microsoft Office software, there are the Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) tests in Word, Excel, Access, etc. The students will benefit because they can use the certificates when applying for jobs. The Electronics program is already a CISCO networking academy.
Planning Agenda

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  Instructors should consider exploring the use of standardized tests to measure Student Learning Outcomes.
  

II.A.6. The institution assures that students and prospective students receive clear and accurate information about educational courses and programs and transfer policies. The institution describes its degrees and certificates in terms of their purpose, content, course requirements, and expected student learning outcomes. In every class section students receive a course syllabus that specifies learning objectives consistent with those in the institution’s officially approved course outline.