2008 (covering 2007) Assessment Report, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology (Sociology Major only)
2. Betsy Lucal, Chair of Soc/Anthro Assessment Committee
3. Lucal
4. Gail McGuire, Department Chair

1. Our educational goals for sociology majors are for them to develop:

a. Ability to apply the sociological imagination to trace the links between individual experiences and social forces and between social forces and history to critically understand oneself.
b. Understanding of substantive issues, which include how culture and social structures operate, the reciprocal relationships between individual and society, the relationships between macro and micro levels of social reality, and the impact of social institutions and social inequality on society.
c. Understanding of sociological research methods, both quantitative and qualitative, including how to interpret findings of such research, awareness of the assumptions built into various research methods and how the choice of a particular method may affect research conclusions and the advantages and disadvantages of applying a particular research method to a research question.
d. Awareness of the role of sociological theory and ability to discuss, apply, and describe some basic theories or theoretical orientations in at least one area of social reality.
e. Development of an understanding of social structures and processes connected with race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.
f. Development of a global and multicultural perspective on the social world, including an awareness of factors contributing to social and cultural diversity.
                We have not changed these goals since the 2006 Assessment Report.

1. Our assessment techniques were:

Direct: Review of student portfolios of work from all sociology courses taken by majors (especially the required theory, methods and 400-level seminar courses) by assessment committee. Note that we have vacillated about which courses to collect materials from: We tried collecting them only from the required courses; but this approach did not provide enough materials so we have returned to collecting materials from all sociology courses taken after a student declares a sociology major. We also need to make sure all faculty members are contributing materials for the portfolios. For similar reasons, we returned to the practice of examining student transcripts as part of the portfolios, as this record can provide additional evidence. (This year’s committee was: Otis Grant, Betsy Lucal and Jay Vanderveen.)

Indirect: Survey of graduating seniors that asks how well they achieved departmental learning goals, what aspects of their education helped them with their learning and why, and what the department might do to help them learn more effectively and why those changes would help them. After achieving such a low response rate when we first implemented the survey, we changed our approach. Surveys were sent out twice with a slightly different letter imploring students to return them. We were able to check addresses and catch a few that were incorrect. Six out of fourteen graduates returned the survey; while this is still less than 50 percent, it was  an improvement over previous attempts. In a further attempt to continue to improve our response rate, surveys were personally distributed to May 2008 graduates by their professors near the end of the spring semester.

We also use a rubric for assessing the student portfolios. It can be viewed at:
http://landmark-project.com/classweb/tools/printable.php?rbrc_id=166817

1. The Assessment Committee met on 28 April 2008 to discuss the results of portfolio assessment and informal analysis of the survey of graduates.  We agreed that students seemed to be meeting or exceeding our expectations for Objectives 2, 3, 4, and 5. We concluded that Objective 1 is difficult to measure based on the materials included in the portfolios and discussed ways to gather better evidence for this objective. Because we are confident that most of our students are meeting this goal, we need to be able to document that fact. Objective 6 remains the goal least likely to be met by our students (and here we believe that evidence is lacking because there really is little evidence for many students, not simply because it is not being captured in the portfolios). We discussed mechanisms for improving our achievement of this goal for the program. We discussed whether an analysis of course syllabi would provide further evidence to support whether students are meeting our objectives.

In the surveys, students rated themselves as mostly meeting or exceeding the learning goals for the program. Comments from students indicated that their experience in the program was a positive one. As we continue to improve data collection with respect to this indirect assessment technique, we expect to learn more about students’ perceptions of the program.
It continues to be our goal to complete annual assessment activities early enough to discuss them at a spring faculty meeting. Once again, life and departmental needs intervened to prevent us from doing so. However, we are moving closer to our target. Getting graduate surveys to students closer to their actual graduation date will also help us achieve this goal (in addition to getting a higher response rate). We will present these findings and our suggestions for action at the department’s fall retreat.

1. Two issues to be addressed are: (1) Providing students with the experiences they need to meet our expectations for Objective 6 and (2) collecting better data to analyze. For the second issue, this means achieving a higher response rate for the survey of graduates and determining whether an additional assessment technique (such as the analysis of syllabi briefly discussed above) will provide additional meaningful assessment data.

Betsy Lucal
Sociology
IU South Bend