UW Wins Hesburgh Award for Undergraduate Teaching and Learning |  
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Jan. 29, 2007 -- The University of Wyoming was selected as the winner of the 2007 TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award recognizing the college or university sponsoring the most effective program for enhancing undergraduate teaching and student learning. The award comes with a $25,000 cash prize, which will be presented Feb. 12 during the American Council on Education (ACE) annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
"This is fantastic news," says UW President Tom Buchanan, "and recognition of UW's innovative thinking to help at-risk students. Wyoming is unique in having only one four-year degree-granting institution of higher education, and each year we accept a range of students from the best prepared to those who face significant challenges at the college level. This award recognizes an outstanding effort to help students who need our help the most."
UW was recognized for the Synergy Program, a learning community designed to help first-year students build relationships with peers and faculty and succeed in some of the most difficult general education courses. Each year, the program serves approximately 150 provisionally-admitted students who enter the university with low ACT or high school GPA scores. They are at significantly greater risk for academic failure or dropout than regularly-admitted students. Thirty percent of participants are minority students; nearly 41 percent come from poor or working class families and are first-generation college students.
The program's instructors work throughout the year to make connections among writing, critical thinking, public speaking, and government courses. Currently, instructors from English, political science, international studies, communications, and philosophy teach these courses.
During its first five years, Synergy has shown excellent promise in helping at-risk students to succeed during their first year. In 2005, Synergy students earned an average GPA of 2.08, markedly higher than the average of 1.77 earned by at-risk students in 2000, the year before the program began.
In 2005, the number of provisionally-admitted students placed on academic probation dropped 23 percent from 2000. And in 2003-04, 87 percent of Synergy students were retained from fall semester of their first year to the fall semester of their sophomore year, compared with 81 percent in 2000. Because of the program's popularity, in 2006, the Office of Admissions began a waiting list for regularly-admitted students desiring to participate in the learning community.
"Synergy has proven to be an important program for helping at-risk students," says Buchanan, "but we're limited in the number of students we can help. Because we have a waiting list for students to enter the Synergy program, we have restricted the number of students we can admit provisionally. The ideal solution is to better prepare students for college during their junior high and high school years. A success curriculum would go a long way toward preparing more students for the academic rigors of college coursework."
Instructors in the Synergy Program have seen dramatic and positive effects on their ability to teach academic and university life skills to first-year students both within and outside of the learning community. In 2004, Synergy received the National Conference on Basic Writing's Award for Innovation, and in 2005, the program was invited to participate in a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) funded assessment project sponsored by the UW Center for Teaching and Learning.
The Synergy Program, which operates as part of the UW Learning Resource Network (LeaRN), is coordinated by April Heaney, lecturer in the Department of English. The program is funded as a special project from the Office of Academic Affairs.
The TIAA-CREF Hesburgh Award is named in honor of Theodore M. Hesburgh, president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame and former member of the TIAA and CREF boards of overseers. It seeks to strengthen teaching at America's undergraduate colleges and universities by acknowledging that an energized faculty is the key to educational excellence. Past winners include the University of Colorado at Boulder and Indiana University at Bloomington.
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These instructors in UW's Synergy Program recently were honored for their success in enhancing undergraduate teaching and student learning. From left, bottom row, are Rachel Stevens, Justin Stewart, April Heaney, Carolyn Young, Deborah Bass, and Pam Galbreath.Top row, Rick Fisher, Michael Knievel, Joyce Stewart and Nyla Bailey. (UW Photo)
Posted on Monday, January 29, 2007
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