Program: English (BA)
Degree: Bachelor's
Date: Fri Sep 21, 2012 - 12:06:30 am
1) Below are your program's student learning outcomes (SLOs). Please update as needed.
Students develop advanced skills as readers, writers, and interpreters of texts across a variety of genres and rhetorical situations and recognize Hawai’i’s geographic and cultural location in the Pacific as part of a challenging program in literary and cultural studies, English language studies, composition and rhetoric, and creative writing,
2) Your program's SLOs are published as follows. Please update as needed.
Department Website URL: http://www.english.hawaii.edu
Student Handbook. URL, if available online: Information Sheet, Flyer, or Brochure URL, if available online: UHM Catalog. Page Number: 115 Course Syllabi. URL, if available online: Other: English Department Mission Statement and Strategic Plan, p. 2 at http://www.english.hawaii.edu/users 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, 2011 and September 30, 2012? (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 June 1, 2011 to September 30, 2012: State the assessment question(s) and/or assessment goals. Include the SLOs that were targeted, if applicable.
1. Completion of undergraduate curriculum map.
2. Completion of assessment of (50% completed in 2010-11) of Foundation Written Communication SLO #3: Students will be able to compose an argument that makes use of source material that is relevant and credible and that is integrated in accordance with an appropriate style guide.
3. Assessment of Foundation Written Communication SLO #2: Students will be able to provide evidence of strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading a text in order to produce finished prose.
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 sub-committee of the Department Curriculum Committee (which included the department's assessment co-ordinator) met with the Manoa Assessment Office (April 12) and completed 30% of the Undergraduate Program Curricilum Map (and this will be completed Fall 12).
2. SLO #3: Assessment begun during AY 2011-12 was completed Nov 2011 (see report from 2010-11 for details of materials).
3. SLO #2: Student work from eight FW sections was collected in SPR 2011 (24 sets of student papers).
8) State how many persons submitted evidence that was evaluated. If applicable, please include the sampling technique used.
SLO # 2: 24 sets of student papers
Random stratified sampling (by section)
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: Department Assessment Coordinator10) 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: 11) For the assessment question(s) and/or assessment goal(s) stated in Question #6:
Summarize the actual results.
Assessment of SLO #3 was completed Nov. 10, 2011, and the results were added to those obtained from the previous assessment of SLO #3 (which covered roughly 50% of the actual materials collected). The results were consistent with those already achieved, and the assessment report from 2010-11therefore needs no further amendment.
For the assessment of SLO #2 (the writing process), in SPR 12, a departmental meeting of interested faculty (April 14, 2012) initially read a selected sample of the student portfolios collected in order to discuss and refine the rubric to be used in the actual reading session at the end of the semester. Several modifications to the previously established rubric were agreed. It was also suggested that, to enable a more accurate assessment of this SLO, instructors should require students in sections from which papers are to be collected in the future to label the various drafts more accurately. Nevertheless, the full reading of the papers produced results which, despite the clear need for improvement, clearly indicate a satisfactory achievent of this SLO: 67% provided sufficient evidence of idea generating; 63% provided sufficient evidence of revising; 71% provided sufficient evidence of editing and proofreading. It is recommended that the first-year writing director/committee and departmental curiculum committee consider a proposal to mandate that all instructors of FW courses offer at least one assignment in which students must produce evidence of generating, revising, and editing/proofreading.
12) State how the program used the results or plans to use the results. Please be specific.
For the moment, the program will not conduct further assessment of the Foundation Written Communication (English/ELI 100), but it is nevertheless expected that the full reports on each of the three SLOs assessed during the last three years will be examined carefully by the director of first-year writing, and that any recommended curricular changes will be discussed in appropiate committees and at departmental level. Given the range of the areas of speicalisation of the faculty that teach ENG 100, for example, the notion of mandating certain specific exercises or types of paper in the syllabus (to fulfill the current set of SLOs) is not necessarily deemed uncontentious, and further discussion of theses issues within the department as a whole is expected. This will inevitably happen as we complete the curriculum map and then begin (in AY 2012/13) assessment of the ENG 270 (Introduction to Literature) series.
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.
The most obvious conclusion reached is the dialectic nature of the procedure: the initial SLOs and the rubrics to assess them have consistently had to be amended based on the experience gained from the actual practice of assessment. The same process (learning by doing) is expected to continue as the department moves to assess the 270 series. Unfortunately, departmental assessment meertings have not been well attended, and it is to be hoped that SLO and rubric discussions to assess the 270 series will generate more interest from tenured faculty.