Program: Art History (MA), Art (MFA)
Degree: Master's
Date: Thu Oct 04, 2012 - 1:02:41 pm
1) Below are your program's student learning outcomes (SLOs). Please update as needed.
Our department has five degree programs: the BA in studio art, the BA in art history, the BFA (a pre-professional studio art degree), the MFA (a terminal degree for studio artists) and the MA in art history. Each of these programs has developed five SLOs organized around five themes which are shared across programs. The result is a matrix of 25 program-level SLOs, which is downloadable in PDF format on our departmental website at http://www.hawaii.edu/art/students/resources/PDFs/2008assess_matrix-1.pdf .
2) Your program's SLOs are published as follows. Please update as needed.
Department Website URL: http://www.hawaii.edu/art/students/resources/PDFs/2008assess_matrix-1.pdf
Student Handbook. URL, if available online: Information Sheet, Flyer, or Brochure URL, if available online: UHM Catalog. Page Number: Course Syllabi. URL, if available online: NA 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, 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.
Our department’s protocol for assessment evaluates the work of graduating students in each of our five degree programs. In each annual round of assessment, we evaluate the work of students in a single degree program, based on the five program SLOs (per degree program) listed in item 1 above. This year’s assessment was intended to target the MA program, for which the SLOs are:
1. Technique/Practice: Demonstrate an advanced ability to do research or curatorial work with original artworks in museum and gallery collections.
2. Creativity/Originality: Demonstrate the ability to do primary source research and construct an advanced, original art-historical argument.
3. Knowledge/History: Demonstrate a broad grasp of the history of art within Asian-Pacific cultural contexts and an advanced specialist knowledge of a particular period, culture, and set of related issues.
4. Communication/Analysis/Critique: Demonstrate an advanced understanding of art historical and critical issues, methods, and theories, and the ability to apply them in sophisticated ways in written work.
5. Professional Skills: Write and successfully defend a masters’ thesis in which original primary research forms the foundation for an original argument about art in the student’s area of specialization.
The program wanted to find out what proportion of our graduating MFA students are meeting or exceeding these five goals at the point of graduation.
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.
All graduating MA students were required to submit a portfolio consisting of their thesis, a CV, three to five student papers outside the thesis, and documentation of museum or gallery work (where relevant).
8) State how many persons submitted evidence that was evaluated. If applicable, please include the sampling technique used.
Three graduating MA students were required to submit portfolios this year, but we had some difficulty with the collection procedure we’d set up and as a result are still collecting them (see item 11 below). Assessment of the MA program raises the same challenge as assessment of the MFA program did last year: that both graduate programs are so small that the number of graduates in a single year is far too small to generate any statistically significant assessment results. We therefore elected not to formally assess either MA or MFA portfolios, as had been originally planned for this year. We will continue to collect MA portfolios from graduating students each year, and by the next round of MA assessment (in five years’ time), we will have enough to conduct formal assessment according to our departmental protocol.
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: 10) 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.
If assessment had proceeded according to the departmental protocols, the evaluation of the MA portfolios would still be ongoing. Because the portfolios are collected from graduating students, they only become available during finals week of Spring Semester. The actual evaluation work then takes place during the fall semester of the following academic year.
Similarly, we would ordinarily report the results of MFA assessment (of portfolios collected the year before and assessed in the fall of 2011) in this year’s report, but because of the too-small sample size, we did not formally assess the portfolios we received, but filed them for assessment with a larger group when the next round occurs.
Since we didn’t have enough portfolios for meaningful assessment of either graduate program, we spent our efforts this year in developing methods and strategies for reliably collecting portfolios from graduating students at all levels. Given the size of the department, this has turned out to be a major challenge requiring creative solutions. See item 14 below for a summary of the initiatives we put in place this year to solve the problem.
12) State how the program used the results or plans to use the results. Please be specific.
Normally we bring the results to a faculty meeting and discuss the need (if any) for further action. In the absence of statistically significant results, our departmental discussions focused instead on refining our methods for collecting portfolios. See item 14 below.
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.
See item 14 for more details.
14) If the program did not engage in assessment activities, please explain.
Or, if the program did engage in assessment activities, please add any other important information here.
The department faces an upcoming challenge: in the coming year we are scheduled to evaluate the graduation portfolios of BA students in studio art, our largest degree program. In preparation for this, we have spent the last year or so experimenting with methods of collecting graduation portfolios from graduating BA students in both tracks (studio art and art history).
The most effective solution has been the institution (this academic year) of a one-credit course, ART 409, required for all BA students for graduation. Credit for this “course” is earned when the student submits the graduation portfolio, thus providing students with an incentive to complete and submit them. We anticipate that this will finally bring our portfolio submission rates up to 100%, enabling us to assess a truly representative sample of our graduates.
Collection of graduation portfolios from MA and MFA graduates currently devolves on the Graduate Chair (for MFAs) and the Art History Graduate Director (for MAs). We hope that continuing efforts to raise awareness among our MA and MFA students of the need to submit portfolios will make this work more streamlined and less onerous than it currently can be for these two faculty members.