Program: English (PhD)
Degree: Doctorate
Date: Tue Nov 04, 2014 - 4:13:52 pm
1) Below are your program's student learning outcomes (SLOs). Please update as needed.
1) understanding of the discipline of English today and its relationship to other disciplines
2) awareness of the contributions of Oceanic and/or Asian cultures to the formation of English Studies in the 21st century
3) understanding of advanced research methods and/or creative techniques
4) ability to demonstrate advanced critical analysis in both written and oral formats
5) ability to map, historicize and contextual three specialized sub-fields
6) college-level teaching skills
7) advanced research and/or creative skills for a book-length publications
2) Your program's SLOs are published as follows. Please update as needed.
Department Website URL: http://www.english.hawaii.edu/grad/grad.html
Student Handbook. URL, if available online: Information Sheet, Flyer, or Brochure URL, if available online: NA UHM Catalog. Page Number: Course Syllabi. URL, if available online: Other: Other: 3) Select one option:
- File (03/16/2020)
4) For your program, the percentage of courses that have course SLOs explicitly stated on the syllabus, a website, or other publicly available document is as follows. Please update as needed.
0% 1-50% 51-80% 81-99%
100%5) Did your program engage in any program assessment activities between June 1, 2013 and September 30, 2014? (e.g., establishing/revising outcomes, aligning the curriculum to outcomes, collecting evidence, interpreting evidence, using results, revising the assessment plan, creating surveys or tests, etc.)
Yes No (skip to question 14)6) For the period between June 1, 2013 and September 30, 2014: State the assessment question(s) and/or assessment goals. Include the SLOs that were targeted, if applicable.
SLO # 6: college-level teaching skills
Due to changes in declining numbers of tenure-line faculty, the English department could no longer maintain the rotation that has tenure-line faculty teaching ENG 100 once every four semesters and adequately cover the courses in the major; therefore the faculty voted to end the ENG 100 rotation for tenure-line faculty. Traditionally, our training for our PhD GAs involved their apprenticing in an ENG 100 course taught by a tenure-line faculty member in their first semester, while at the same time taking ENG 605 Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition. In the second semester, after this training, they were then given sections of ENG 100 of their own to teach. Because training of the graduate students is the responsibility of the tenure-line, graduate faculty and not adjuncts, we are having to rethink the kind of training we provide PhD-level GAs before we put them in their own ENG 100 classroom. Without the apprenticeship training, it seems that common syllabi would provide one way to ensure more consistency across sections of ENG 100 and would give GAs teaching ENG 100 more of a cohort and chance to learn from each other. Our questions are about what kinds of content focus (aside from writing) would most interest PhD students teaching ENG 100 and also the degree to which they feel prepared to teach ENG 100 and where they feel that they got this preparation (apprenticing, ENG 605, throught workshops, etc.). We also looked at the course evaluations for PhD GAs teaching ENG 100 for the first time over a five year period to see how well they have done (according to their students) in that first semester of teaching on their own.
7) State the type(s) of evidence gathered to answer the assessment question and/or meet the assessment goals that were given in Question #6.
1) a Monkey Survey of PhD-level GAs over the past five years who have taught ENG 100.
2) statistical analysis of the course evaluations of PhD GAs in their first semester of teaching ENG 100.
8) State how many persons submitted evidence that was evaluated. If applicable, please include the sampling technique used.
38 PhD-level Graduate Assistants were sent the survery, with 31 of those completing the survey, for a return rate of approximately 82%.
9) Who interpreted or analyzed the evidence that was collected? (Check all that apply.)
Course instructor(s) Faculty committee Ad hoc faculty group Department chairperson Persons or organization outside the university Faculty advisor Advisors (in student support services) Students (graduate or undergraduate) Dean/Director Other: Graduate Director, Acting Graduate Director, Composition and Rhetoric Director, Assistant Director for Undergraduate and Graduate Programs10) How did they evaluate, analyze, or interpret the evidence? (Check all that apply.)
Used a rubric or scoring guide Scored exams/tests/quizzes Used professional judgment (no rubric or scoring guide used) Compiled survey results Used qualitative methods on interview, focus group, open-ended response data External organization/person analyzed data (e.g., external organization administered and scored the nursing licensing exam) Other: statistical analysis of the course evaluations of phD-level GAs taken at the end of their first semester teaching ENG 10011) For the assessment question(s) and/or assessment goal(s) stated in Question #6:
Summarize the actual results.
Please see attached documents:
12) State how the program used the results or plans to use the results. Please be specific.
The Director of Composition and Rhetoric will be developing 2-3 common syllabi for ENG 100 over this academic year, and this survey helps her to determine which topics these syllabi might be focused around.
The Graduate Program Committee, the Director of Compostition and Rhetoric, Chair and Associate Chair will review this year the data from the survey to determine how we can best train our new PhD-level GAs to teach ENG 100. For example, could we require first year GAs to observe a set number of ENG 100 courses before they teach their own classes? Could we have graduate faculty volunteer to mentor the GAs teaching ENG 100, even though they may not themselves be teaching the course? Can workshops be mandated, or a certain number of workshops? These are issues that we will need to resolve this academic year.
13) Beyond the results, were there additional conclusions or discoveries?
This can include insights about assessment procedures, teaching and learning, program aspects and so on.
Having an authentic assessment question, one that you have a pressing need to know the answer to can help significantly.
Overall, we were pleasantly surprised that our PhD-level GAs do so well in the ENG 100 classroom. Their students are pleased and they also seem to have a fairly high level of confidence. These two things confirm the success of our previous training program. Our goal will be to try to achieve something similar without embedding first year GAs in their first semesters in the ENG 100 courses taught by tenure-line faculty.