Thursday, March 28, 2024
The RP Group

 2012 Lifetime Achievement

The 2012 POWER Awards for Lifetime Achievement honored the following individuals:

Jerry RudmannJerry Rudmann, Lifetime Achievement Award 2012
Psychology Faculty, Irvine Valley College and
Institutional Researcher, Coastline College (Retired)

In the early 2000s, Jerry attended an accreditation workshop on student learning outcomes (SLOs). Serving as a Board member for the RP Group, he learned about RP's plans to build a series of statewide workshops on making sense of SLOs and assessing them. Jerry has been working with SLOs inside and outside his own institution for years.

On the outside, he is currently serving on the American Psychological Association's task force that is charged with updating the learning outcomes for the Baccalaureate in psychology.

In rolling out the process at his own college, Coastline Community College, he fondly remembers his work with the Student Services staff. After introducing SLOs to this group at a local Claim Jumper restaurant, he interviewed each service leader over the next two weeks to develop service SLOs.

In one such conversation, the Extended Opportunity Program and Services (EOPS) Director stated that the singular, most important outcome for their work with students was to build students' confidence. As a psychologist, Jerry had known about Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy, but after that conversation, Jerry did a lot of sleuthing and learning about related concepts such as self-regulation, self-hope and goal clarity.

When the EOPS director hosted a meeting with other EOPS directors in the region, Jerry persuaded them to launch a multi-college outcomes study. The study found that students who received EOPS services reported greater academic and career goal clarity, and higher academic hope and self-efficacy and that these positive outcomes correlated with higher GPA and retention rates.

Soon, the study was expanded to include Disabled Student Programs and Services (DSPS). The findings were eventually published in a peer-reviewed journal. For Jerry, this experience led him to realize that there are alternative definitions and many levels of student success. In short, everything counts.


Julie SlarkJulie Slark, Lifetime Achievement Award 2012
Assistant Vice Chancellor of Education Services
Rancho Santiago Community College (Retired)

Julie Slark began her career as an institutional researcher in 1977. At that time, aside from a few learning outcomes studies, such as the Learning Assessment Retention Consortium's basic skills student learning outcomes study (which Julie directed), the trend of focusing on student "inputs" and occasionally student achievement rather than student learning continued well into the 1990s.

In 1998, the ACCJC asked Julie, who was serving as the President of the Research and Planning (RP) Group, to support the nascent student learning outcomes (SLOs) efforts by representing the RP Group to co-sponsor several assessment institutes.

Realizing that a shift was taking place and that colleges would need greater support, the co-sponsoring organizations, led by Julie and several colleagues, next designed a series of statewide workshops to meet the colleges where they were, literally and figuratively. Since then, as colleges have translated the student learning outcomes process into their own college efforts, Julie has continued to be involved in a variety of activities, including participating as a program co-coordinator for the annual Student Success Conference, serving as a mentor for the WASC Assessment Workshop, and providing workshops for colleges, to support student learning outcomes.