Four Win 2026 Excellence in Educational Effectiveness Award
Four faculty and staff across Stony Brook University this spring received the Excellence in Educational Effectiveness Award from the Office of Educational Effectiveness and the Provost’s Office.
The award winners come from a wide range of academic departments and divisions, including several departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Division of Undergraduate Education and the School of Nursing.
“Assessment is a key part of organizational effectiveness, instructional development and accreditation,” said Catherine Scott, director of educational effectiveness. “In the past several years, faculty and staff across Stony Brook have embraced and implemented a culture of assessment, and we are seeing these efforts pay off across our programs and in our outcomes.”
The award was established in 2022 to recognize faculty and staff for their commitment to best practices in academic assessment and using those results to drive programmatic excellence. Winners are selected by the SBU Assessment Council and the provost.
“I’m so pleased to see our faculty and staff being nominated for this award, because it signals that assessment continues to be recognized as a vital part of what we do and our commitment to continuous improvement,” said Carl W. Lejuez, executive vice president and provost. “Congratulations to this year’s winners.”
The 2025-2026 winners are listed below.
Brenda Janotha
Associate Dean for Academics and Clinical Associate Professor, School of Nursing
Janotha has built a sustainable culture of assessment at the School of Nursing through decades of evidence-based teaching innovations and institutional leadership. Her work includes designing and evaluating active-learning strategies, such as team-based learning, flipped classroom models, and just-in-time teaching, that have demonstrated measurable improvements in student outcomes and been adopted across undergraduate and graduate curricula. Most recently, she has led a major school-wide curricular revision aligned with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing’s new competency-based education framework, including faculty development workshops, course mapping and the integration of a software platform to track student competency attainment across all programs beginning in 2026.
Kelly Haller
Academic Programs Coordinator, Department of Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences
Haller has been instrumental in building a sustainable, data-driven assessment culture in the Department of Sociology, which boasts the largest minor on campus with approximately 800 students. Drawing on her graduate-level certification in assessment, she developed a comprehensive model to track student outcomes across multiple courses and semesters, working closely with faculty to identify the metrics and methods best suited to measuring student success. Her approach is deeply student-centered, informed by her extensive advising experience, and has contributed to consistent program growth. She also created a PhD Pathway Guide to support graduate students in academic planning and career development, exemplifying her commitment to student success at every level.
Kristy Hare
Associate Director, Academic Success and Tutoring Center, Division of Undergraduate Education
Michelle Setnikar
Associate Director, Undergraduate Retention Initiatives and Success Engagement
Setnikar and Hare co-created and lead the Sophomore Academic Resilience Program, a five-week immersive summer experience for first-year students who earned below a 2.0 GPA. The program provides at-promise students with a comprehensive support network. including housing, financial aid, advising, tutoring and wellness programming, alongside two funded summer courses.
Working with the Office of Educational Effectiveness, they developed rigorous program evaluation metrics, including the Academic Hope Scale as a pre/post assessment tool. Results from the inaugural 2024 cohort of 30 students were striking: participants reported major gains in study strategies, time management, motivation and confidence, while all 30 students continued into the fall semester with an average summer GPA of 3.67. Their research on hope theory as a framework for supporting at-promise students has since been presented at a national higher education conference, pointing to the program’s potential as a scalable model for student retention.