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Northwest Vista College News

Reading Discipline Retention Rates Climb

Reading Coordinator Vicki Lynton recently reported on trends in retention rates for the reading discipline. As seen in the bar chart below, fall-to-fall retention rates have risen each year since Fall 2005. Retention for the discipline now stands at 93%.

The increased retention rate from 91% in Fall 2007 to 93 % in Fall 2008 was attained in spite of a 22% increase in student enrollment from 698 to 854 during the same period.

Retention rate increases coincide with an emphasis on faculty development. Reading had a 100% attendance rate by adjunct faculty at the Fall 2008 faculty development reading trainings. Many reading adjunct faculty also attended service learning and critical thinking faculty development sessions. Full-time reading faculty members were also involved in 2007-2008 with the NVC Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum and the NVC Collaborative Learning Across the Curriculum Committees. Two full-time faculty members also participated in a reading apprenticeship workshop last summer to learn methods for linking reading skills development to college level courses. Their participation supports the reading mission statement: Fostering intellectual growth through the use of critical thinking strategies to help students prepare for college level reading and real world applications while encouraging a love of reading.

Fall success rates have remained relatively constant over the past three years with a significant increase occurring from fall 2005 to fall 2006.

Priorities for the coming year in reading include:
• improving the correlation between success in reading and success in college level courses with an emphasis on collaborative strategies in history
• training faculty on the reading apprenticeship framework
• improving the reading 0303 curriculum.

NVC's Natalia Trevino Wins Prestigious Prize

Natalia Trevino, assistant professor of English, has been named a major prize winner in the prestigious Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Contest for 2008.

The national contest gives cash prizes, in this case $5,000, for poems that celebrate the human spirit.  Natalia's submissions included, "It Was The Chef Who Finally Explained," which was inspired by NVC Spanish instructor Roberto Rodriguez; "Well, God," a poem about her grandmother in Mexico; and "Afterlife," a lament written after she learned her father had cancer.

Ms. Trevino will use the prize money for tuition at the University of Omaha where she is working on her MFA in fiction writing. The remainder will be donated to Gemini Ink’s Writers in the Communities program (WIC), which sends published authors into schools, institutions and other community settings to set up creative writing projects. This and other Gemini Ink programs have been recognized by the New York Times, San Antonio Express-News and other publications.