Assessment Details
Academic Year: 2021-2022 Level: Undergraduate
Campus Department: Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences [UG and Grad]
Program Type: Core [UG]
Program Name: Philosophy-of-the-Person Core (Link)
Description of Data Collection:
In school year 2021-2022, our department began a new, multi-year initiative to assess the success of the Philosophy of the Person program. The members of our undergraduate committee decided to begin by focusing on the first learning goal: “Students completing the Philosophy core will be able to understand the historical origins of values and principles that ground, and are questioned, in contemporary culture.” Our plan is to focus on each of the additional learning goals in the coming years. (NB: Philosophy of the Person is a sequential, two-semester sequence. The vast majority of students in Phil Person take Phil Person II in the fall, and Phil Person II in the spring, and have the same instructor for both semesters). To assess the program’s degree of success in meeting the first learning goal, we did two things. First, we added two questions to the student evaluations for the spring semesters. Students were asked to select their degree of agreement (scale of 1-5) with the following two statements:
(1) This course helped me to understand how people in earlier eras thought about moral values and principles.
Average Response: 4.59
(2) This course showed me that studying the ideas of past thinkers is a helpful way to understand our own moral values and principles.
Average Response: 4.57
Second, we asked all instructors teaching Phil Person II in Spring 2022 to turn in three completed submissions (randomly selected and anonymized) from any assignment that, in the judgment of the instructor, spoke to the first learning goal. Here are the directions we sent out to instructors: As part of our department’s ongoing assessment of the Philosophy of the Person program, we are asking each of you to submit 3 student submissions for one of your assignments, together with the prompt for that assignment. This semester we are considering the following learning goal: “Students completing the Philosophy core will be able to understand the historical origins of values and
principles that ground and are questioned in contemporary culture.” So please submit a prompt and submissions that in your judgment speaks to that learning goal. This could be a paper, exam, or some other type of assignment. If you have no assignments that speak to that learning goal, then please send a short reply saying so (for the purposes of assessment, which is the point here, that too is a valuable bit of information!). We would like the selections to be both random and anonymous. To make it random (enough), please submit an assignment from the 5th, 10th, and 20th student on your roster as listed alphabetically on Canvas. If you could anonymize these documents before submitting them to us, that would be very helpful. Especially important is that you remove your own name from the assignment prompt and the student submissions. The goal of this project is to assess the program, not any individual instructors. So we prefer to have all this material anonymous. The instructors who will be looking at the prompts and assignments will not know who the instructors or students are. The assignments we received were then read and evaluated by a group of four part-time instructors, each of whom has extensive experience teaching the Philosophy of the Person. The evaluators were: Margarita Fenn, Stephen Mendelsohn, James Oldfield, and Paul Van Rooy. At the end of this document, we have attached (a) the three-question rubric that we asked these evaluators to use for each of the submitted assignments, and (b) the results of the evaluation. In addition to assigning numerical values, each of the four evaluators wrote several paragraphs providing their thoughts on the submissions, the assessment process, and possible improvements to both the course and the assessment process.
Review Process:
This evidence was reviewed by the DUS and undergraduate committee. Our current DUS is on parental leave in fall 2022, so the evaluation process has been slowed, but will resume in earnest in spring 2023.
Resulting Program Changes:
See below for further results. Our department has not yet made any concrete changes on the basis of these results: discussions are ongoing about how to improve both the Philosophy of the Person course and our assessment of that course
Date of Most Recent Program Review:
See below for further results. Our department has not yet made any concrete changes on the basis of these results: discussions are ongoing about how to improve both the Philosophy of the Person course and our assessment of that course
Attachments (if available)