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Program Name – Women’s Studies
b. Report prepared by – Rebecca Torstrick
c. Who is the current assessment contact for your program? The Director. As of July 1, that will be Lesley Walker (to December 31); effective January 1, 2008, it is Cathy Borshuk
d. Should assessment information be sent to anyone else in your department? No
1. What are the program’s educational goals? (Please take goals directly from your program’s assessment plan, and highlight any changes made this year.)
Goal 1: To take into consideration gender, race, class, and sexual orientation in all scholarly activity. |
Goal 2: To demonstrate knowledge of the diversity of women's experiences across cultures and history |
Goal 3: To be able to voice and provide substantive evidence for their own opinions and bring others into a respectful dialogue. |
Goal 4: To demonstrate their own capacity as creators of knowledge through original scholarship, research and/or creative activity. |
Goal 5: To demonstrate a capacity to place personal and local experiences into the relevant broader structural contexts. |
2. What assessment techniques did the program use? (Please take assessment techniques directly from your program’s assessment plan and highlight any changes made this year.)
We will meet over the summer to review the files of the two students graduating this May. At that time, we will review the files for students who graduated in 2004-2007 (May) (a total of 7 students).
The two students graduating this spring have incomplete portfolios because we adopted a new assessment plan based on course portfolios in Fall 2005. In addition, these students are completing their programs under old curricular guidelines. We put a new curriculum in place in Fall 2004. It will be another three semesters before we will have graduated sufficient students under the new curriculum and the new assessment plan for us to be able to make any meaningful inferences from the data we will have collected.
We are now using the following techniques: 1) Portfolio composed of student work from WOST required core courses (W100, W301, W299, W360, W480, and senior seminar), and 2) Exit Interview with each graduating senior to discuss their perceptions of the quality of their learning and their suggestions for improvement.
Exit interviews will be arranged with the two students graduating in May for later in the summer with the Assessment Committee. One of the students is currently not resident in South Bend and we will wait until we can bring both students together so that we can have a discussion with them about their perceptions of the program.
3. What has your program done with assessment information this year? (i.e. communicated results to faculty, staff, alumni and students, made changes in the curriculum, made changes in the budget, added new courses. . .)
After we have met later this summer and determined what assessment information we can retrieve from the files (which may be little since the earlier assessment plan relied on a capstone course and practicum assessment taught by the now-retired director) we will determine how to best make use of the information. It is our intention once we are collecting meaningful data to communicate that to all WOST faculty, students, and alumni.
4. After reflecting on assessment activities in your unit, as a result of assessment what are two issues you would like to address?
To be determined when we meet over the summer.
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