Teaching and Learning
The Division has set the size limit for most classes at 45 students and most faculty accept more if the room allows. Exceptions to this rule are writing intensive classes, CRJ 157 and 194, and the research methods course (CRJ 100), which are all set at 30. Graduate courses are capped at 15, though routinely go over the cap. CRJ 1 classes have historically been set at 45 but were temporarily raised when the rooms allowed during the current funding crisis. The Division had few other options for sustaining FTEs while cutting expenditures. We have no Undergraduate Coordinator; the Graduate Coordinator gets only 6 units of assigned time per year; and the Chair teaches three units every semester. Other than the cohort advisors and the Graduate Coordinator, no Criminal Justice faculty member has received assigned time funded by the College for several years.
In spite of the heavy teaching load, the faculty in the Division has worked to create an environment commensurate with the University's mission of teaching and learning. Many faculty members employ technology in their lectures with the use of PowerPoint presentations and other visual media. Each course in the Division requires students to produce a writing assignment and many of those assignments require comprehensive research. Student evaluation of the faculty is an important tool that is utilized to assess the quality of teaching in the Division and the results of the evaluations for the faculty are attached to this report as an appendix. The Division Assessment Committee developed a new evaluation instrument that was first introduced in the fall of 2003. This new instrument was designed to produce qualitative data on the experience of students in criminal justice courses by emphasizing student narratives and precluding production of a single numeric “average” for a faculty member's performance.
The Division requires student evaluation of faculty in all classes. For fall 2004, students' responses for individual faculty to the statement, “this was an excellent class”, ranged from six to ninety-five percent agreement and to the statement “this was an excellent teacher” ranged from seventeen to ninety-six percent agreement. The median support was 82.5 and 76.5 for these questions respectively. Likewise, students widely supported the contention that classes were well-organized and presented at an appropriate level of complexity.
Some of the innovative pedagogical tools being employed by Division faculty include mock trials, appellate briefs, and appellate arguments in the law courses. Oral presentations are required in many of the other courses in the Division. The law faculty employ the case briefing method of study in all of the Division law courses, providing a framework for teaching critical thinking and analytical reasoning in a Socratic format. Students are required to create and present PowerPoint presentations in Dr. Capron's courses. In the course on court structure, students are required to spend a significant amount of time visiting local criminal court proceedings, researching law review articles on those proceedings, and writing a comparative report on the experience. Corrections students participate in field trips to nearby prison facilities.
In the master's program, Dr. Yvette Farmer taught a course on evaluations research, the substance of which was a real program evaluation of the Division of Criminal Justice at CSU, Sacramento . The students engaged in the creation of a survey tool, the collection of data, the analysis of that data, and production of the final report for the Division. They also ran focus groups as a part of the project.
In Criminal Justice , this scholarship is reflected in the department's student learning goals, its curriculum, course syllabi, and faculty and departmental activities related to teaching.
