This site is your home for Pepperdine University's Program Planning and Review process.  The university's next accreditation visit from WASC occurs in 2008. In preparation for that event, we are engaging in a comprehensive Program Planning and Review cycle process based on the following timeline.

The fundamental principle employed for this process is:

Programs engage in planning and review best when 

they organize these activities themselves.  

This principle has its roots in nature itself:

"The maintenance of organization in nature is not – and cannot be – achieved by central management; order can only be maintained by self-organization.  Self-organizing systems allow adaptation to the prevailing environment, i.e. they react to changes in the environment with a thermodynamic response which makes the systems extraordinarily flexible and robust against perturbations from outside conditions." (C.K. Biebracher, G. Nicolis, and P. Schuster, Self-Organization in the Physico-Chemical and Life Sciences, Report EUR 16546, European Commission, 1995.)

Accordingly, this site is your invitation to submit a research proposal for carrying out the planning and review process that you design for your own area. 

In preparation for submitting materials through this web interface please do the following:

1.    Assemble the faculty and staff in your program area to review the Program Profile that Institutional Research has customized to your program. Engage in dialogue with your division/department about the profile contents and begin to formulate research questions about the future vitality of your program over the next three to five years. 

2.    Please discuss the following questions with your colleagues:

    a.    What are the guiding principles of your program? 

    b.    How do you define Quality in each of the following areas for your program?

•            Incoming Students, Student Performance, Graduate Placement

•            Faculty qualifications, Faculty productivity, Faculty & Student Research

•            Pedagogy, Curriculum            

•            Connection to the Christian Mission

    c.    What are the three to five greatest challenges facing your area in the next five years?

3.    Delineate the goals (where you want to be) and objectives (also known as learning outcomes, constituting the means

of achieving program goals) for your program.

4.    Construct a Curriculum Cohesiveness Matrix for all of the courses in your curriculum. (See Mary Allen's excellent book on the process described in steps 4-7.)

5.    Decide which objective/course pairs to analyze.

6.    Collect student work from these courses to ascertain the degree to which these objectives are being met.

7.    Based on your findings, determine what changes need to be made in the curriculum.

8.    Submit your Final Report using the following Template

9.    Annual Reviews should follow the following protocol in the intervening years between major, quint-annual program reviews.

Resource Materials

Field Guide To Academic Leadership, Robert M. Diamond, Ed., Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Departmental Assessment - How Some Campuses are Effectively Evaluating the Collective Work of Faculty, Jon F. Wergin and Judi N. Swingen, AAHE, 2000.

WASC Resource Links

WASC Handbook of Accreditation, January 2001.

Evidence Guide, January 2002.