Assessment Details
Academic Year: 2019-2020 Level: Undergraduate
Campus Department: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences [UG and Grad]
Program Type: Major [UG] / Program [Grad]
Program Name: English BA (Link)
Description of Data Collection:
Each year an Assessment Committee is constituted by the department chair, generally composed of both full-time tenure line department faculty and at least one representative of the department’s professors of the practice. Each year’s committee, as guided by the department chairperson and, in some cases, the prior year’s report, identifies concrete components of students’ coursework in relation to the expected outcomes. In recent years the foundational “Studies in Poetry” course, the department’s “Advanced Topics Seminars,” and undergraduate essay revision skills have been reviewed.
In 2019-20 the Committee was charged with evaluating the expectations and guidelines for writing requirements across our varied department elective offerings, particularly with an eye to how these reflected and supported our learning outcome criteria. Accordingly, in Fall 2019, we made a list of
English Department elective courses and asked their instructors to provide us with, minimally, a course syllabus including an overview of writing assignments and, optionally, any assignment sheets or equivalent they would like to share. We achieved a 100% response rate from our various department instructors and based our analysis on eighteen courses, given by faculty belonging to our department, that could meaningfully be considered electives. Our analytical methodology this year was primarily descriptive, with special attention to the amount of writing assigned in each elective course, the kinds of writing assigned, and any explicit interrelation among formal essay assignments and other kinds of assignments (for example, oral reports, blogs and other web projects, archival research exercises, short response pieces, etc.) We compiled a snapshot of writing requirements across the eighteen courses in tabular form, eventually to share with the full department, as well as providing a written overview drawing on quantitative and descriptive analysis.
Review Process:
A given year’s Assessment Committee assumes primary responsibility for gathering and interpreting relevant data and then making recommendations for the curriculum to the chair and the departmental Planning & Executive committee. Individually and then collectively they examine and evaluate the materials in question. They then provide the Chair with a written report outlining the process they have followed, assessing the strengths and weaknesses in relevant selected material (usually, but not always, examples of student writing), and offering recommendations for developing new protocols for potential use by all instructors in the department.
Resulting Program Changes:
We found that the amount of writing assigned and its dispersal over the course of the semester proves broadly consistent across our elective courses. The most frequently occurring type of assignment might be termed an “argument-driven close reading essay,” and explicit expectations for such assignments prove remarkably similar across a range of courses. We also found a significant variety in terms of writing prompts and pairing with other kinds of assignments. We did find one significant disparity, concerning the weight of the writing assignments taken as a whole in determining the student’s final grade, a range of anywhere from 30% to 85%.
Our recommendation to the chair and the department is to convene a department-wide workshop next fall devoted to this topic, preceded by sharing our committee report, and both preceded and followed by creation and additions to a departmental (online) portfolio of writing assignments across our various elective courses. The primary goal would be learning from one another’s pedagogical practices and, perhaps, addressing the question of how best to weight the writing component in an elective course.
Date of Most Recent Program Review:
We found that the amount of writing assigned and its dispersal over the course of the semester proves broadly consistent across our elective courses. The most frequently occurring type of assignment might be termed an “argument-driven close reading essay,” and explicit expectations for such assignments prove remarkably similar across a range of courses. We also found a significant variety in terms of writing prompts and pairing with other kinds of assignments. We did find one significant disparity, concerning the weight of the writing assignments taken as a whole in determining the student’s final grade, a range of anywhere from 30% to 85%.
Our recommendation to the chair and the department is to convene a department-wide workshop next fall devoted to this topic, preceded by sharing our committee report, and both preceded and followed by creation and additions to a departmental (online) portfolio of writing assignments across our various elective courses. The primary goal would be learning from one another’s pedagogical practices and, perhaps, addressing the question of how best to weight the writing component in an elective course.
Attachments (if available)