Degree Program Assessment Reports

Between November 1, 2018 and October 31, 2020, the American studies department has continued with assessment activities as outlined in the previous assessment report. These are as follows:

• In February-March 2020 we changed the degree requirements for the major in American Studies to support students' timely progress toward degree completion. Specifically, we eliminated one of our core courses, AMST 483, which was focused on having students complete a research proposal for the Senior capstone. Instead, we are matching students with indiividual faculty whose own research and expertise can guide our majors through their capstone projects more efficiently. Originally, the three core courses required for the major, AMST 383: Approaches to American Studies, and AMST 483 and AMST 484 (Senior Capstone sequence), required a three-semester sequencing of courses, which often adversely affected transfer and upper-division students declaring the major later in their academic careers. With this revision the senior capstone will now be completed in a single semester.  

• We also changed the major requirements to allow for an additional lower division AMST elective to count toward major requirements. Prior to this change, we only allowed one 100+level AMST elective to count toward the major; however, it has not been uncommon for students to take 2 lower division AMST electives to fulfill general education requirements before becoming AMST majors. These changes were approved by CALL and the OVCAA for application in Spring 2021. While remaining rigorous, these amendments will serve our students in the timely and successful completion of their degrees and help streamline our major requirements.

• For AMST 484, our Senior capstone course, we are continuing to offer an alternative option for students to complete the requirement via an internship or creative project that also incorporates a substantial amount of writing and research. So far, three students have chosen this option (all of the students are graduating in Spring 2020) and are actively working on their projects now.

• Through these new requirements we are continuing to assess the quality of student capstone projects as an indicator of the success of the required core course sequence, whether via the traditional 20-page thesis or internship/creative project. The evaluation of capstones from the previous 2 years indicates that AMST majors would benefit from increased exposure to research methods in the field, opportunities to apply research and other skills via an internship to explore possible career options, and opportunities to produce creative projects related to students’ interest in the field. These are explored in AMST 383 and students undertake their projects in AMST 484.

• To add further exposure to research methods in AMST as well as writing skills, our curriculum committee is focused on creating benchmarks or guidelines for our undergraduate classes.  In particular, we will be suggesting writing assignments and activities appropriate for 100-, 200-, 300-, and 400-level AMST courses and asking our faculty and instructors to incorporate these assignments into their classes.  For example, we found through interviews with our students that many of them have not been assigned a paper over 7 pages prior to beginning work on their capstone projects.  As a result, many of them are initially intimidated by the capstone and feel underprepared, having little to no strategies in place for working on a major research project. By creating benchmarks or guidelines for our undergraduate classes, we hope to scaffold research and writing skills for students so they can be better prepared for undertaking such research, whether for a 20-page paper or for a creative project or internship.

• We are continuing to use an exit poll (anonymous via the Survey Monkey platform) for our outgoing majors as a means to collect and analyze data regarding our students’ experience in the program. We are also continuing to poll our students on the success of our courses in meeting departmental SLOs through at least two mandatory advising meetings per year with each of our majors and most of our minors. These sessions also provide valuable feedback on the ability of our students to meet their educational goals, their preparedness to complete capstone projects, as well as their general preparedness for higher education and/or career goals after graduation. Though these are qualitative rather than quantitative measures, they provide a valuable source of feedback on our undergraduate program and help to indicate areas in which we need to innovate or shift our approach to better meet our departmental SLOs, and other departmental priorities in regards to our undergraduate program.

• We will also be continuing with our Curriculum Committee (under whom the job of assessment falls) to brainstorm about new departmental strategies to implement various assessment activities going forward.

Senior capstones: 12 students (one faculty member; professional judgment/qualitative measure)

AMST 382/383 students: 28 students (two faculty members; professional judgment/qualitative measure)

Major/minor individual and focus group meetings: approximately 40 students (undergraduate advisor; professional judgment/qualitative measure)

The Curriculum Committee of our department (under whom the work of assessment falls), additionally found that students can and should have access to AMSt faculty via lower dovision courses.  Among our findings was that some of our undergraduate students have only taken courses from our GAs and only 1 or 2 faculty members.  We hope to change this and enable students to have greater access to faculty by developing an AMST gateway course, which faculty will teach on a rotating basis.