Academic Year Assessed

2021 - 2022

Program(s) Assessed

English major - Literature Option; English-Literature Non-Teaching Minor

Please note: The English Department used the opportunity afforded by developing Year 0 Plan in 2021 to undertake an assessment of student learning in each of the department’s three major options, Literature, Writing, and English Education.  Under our new plan, we will use three courses within an option to assess all three Program Learning Outcomes. This approach will also include our two Non-Teaching Minors in Literature and Writing since majors and minors take the same classes.

Assessment Plan, Schedule and Data Source

Multi-year assessment schedule that will show when all program learning outcomes will be assessed, and by what criteria (data).

Assessment Table

Program Learning Outcomes for All Options and Minors

      • Reading: Students will demonstrate the ability to read, synthesize, and discuss a variety of texts. Texts may refer to contexts, genres, audiences, and modalities.
      • Writing: Students will produce writing that is directed toward specific audiences and purposes, and that is focused, well-organized and supported, and well-edited.
      • Research: Students will be able to find, evaluate, and engage with various resources and methodologies as they compose texts that apply information literacy. Students will demonstrate an understanding of disciplinary research strategies, conventions, and integrity.
      • Department threshold values for all three program learning outcomes: 75% of students will meet or exceed Level 3 competency. (Note: The artifacts for LIT 201 and LIT 300 did not include a research component.)
Course         Learning Outcome      Levels 1 & 2     Levels 3 & 4   
LIT 201 Reading 10% 90%
  Writing 20% 80%
Lit 300 Reading 20% 80%
  Writing 20% 80%
LIT 494 Reading 10% 90%
  Writing 10% 90%
  Research 25% 75%

What Was Done

With a few tweaks to the plan timetable, the assessment was completed according to the program's plan.  In our Year 0 Plan, we proposed meeting with faculty in November to discuss the assessment results after submitting the assessment report in October.  The University Assessment and Outcomes Committee suggested that the committee “move the review of the artifacts up if possible, so that a discussion of results can be had earlier in the fall. Ideally, you could report on discussions and changes to the plan or curriculum based on assessment in the Assessment Report due October 15th.”

Receiving an Assessment Innovation and Effectiveness Grant enabled us to move our review of artifacts up to mid-August before the semester began.  Sharing the assessment results with faculty in September proved to be difficult because of multiple department and institution deadlines, and our small faculty is stretched thin across committees. The assessment committee did meet with faculty in mid-October, and faculty feedback has been factored into this plan.  Since early artifact review and receiving faculty feedback on a draft report have increased faculty involvement in the assessment process, one of the committee’s suggestions for “Closing the loop” is to set the dates for the artifact evaluation workshop and September faculty meeting before the end of the Spring 2023 term.

Course Selection
The Year 0 Plan specifies that the Option being assessed will use artifacts from the 200-level introductory seminar (required for majors and minors) and the 400-level capstone seminar (required for majors).  The plan requires Option faculty to select the 300-level course in light of current curricular needs.  The Literature faculty selected LIT 300 (a course which surveys the history of English literary criticism and theories) since it is also a required course for Literature majors.  It should also be noted that during the last major Literature option curriculum revision, LIT 201, LIT 300, and LIT 494 were set as the foundational required courses for the Literature major, along with increasing the number of elective categories/courses.

Artifact Selection
Number of artifacts: The Year 0 Plan stipulates that four artifacts be selected from each of the three assessed courses.

Types of Artifacts
The Year 0 Plan enables each faculty member to select the type(s) of artifacts to demonstrate the curricular goals for their course and to create a diverse artifact sample.

Asking faculty to choose the artifacts choice resulted in an even more diverse sample because each faculty member made a different type of selection:

    • LIT 494: Four final seminar projects
    • LIT 300: Two mid-term exams and two final exams
    • LIT 201: One sample essay for each of the four major assignments for the course

Faculty also submitted syllabi and/or assignment guidelines to provide the assessors with contexts for the student artifacts.

Participants
One of the main goals of our Year 0 Plan was to increase faculty involvement in assessment, and funding from the Assessment Innovation and Effectiveness Grant enabled the Assessment Committee to hold a workshop in August to involve additional faculty in analyzing the data. Three volunteers were solicited from the English Literature faculty, joining two members of the Assessment Committee.

The Year 0 Plan did not specify any qualifications for faculty participants other than that they teach in the option, and all three volunteers were also the professors for the courses selected for assessment.  At the beginning of the workshop, faculty were given the option to recuse themselves from evaluating artifacts from their own courses, and all three faculty agreed to re-evaluate the student artifacts from the perspective of and for the purposes of assessment. As will be shown, for the purposes of this assessment cycle, bringing a dual perspective of professor/evaluator to the workshop discussion was invaluable.

Rubric demonstrating how the data was evaluated:

Assessment Table Rubric

What Was Learned

  • Based on the analysis of the data, and compared to the threshold values established, what was learned from the assessment?

The samples from each of the three courses met the established threshold values, demonstrating that the majority of students are learning the reading, writing, and research skills central to the English Department’s mission.

The fairly consistent results across the courses suggest that LIT 201, LIT 300, and LIT 494 do function well as foundational required courses in the option, with LIT 201 and LIT 300 teaching critical reading and writing skills that prepare students for the next stage of their program.
In our Year 0 Plan, we hypothesized that an option rotation for assessment would enable us “to assess learning at the beginning, middle, and end of students’ careers.” The student artifacts clearly demonstrated students’ developing critical reading and writing skills across the three levels of courses.  (Research skills were not taught in the LIT 201 and LIT 300 sections chosen for assessment.)
We also hypothesized that assessing all three program learning outcomes simultaneously would be productive “because in humanities work the outcomes are frequently interdependent and assessed using the same artifact.”  The student artifacts demonstrated that students are learning the essential interconnections between critical reading and writing skills in their courses.

  • What areas of strength in the program were identified?

The fairly consistent results across the courses suggest that LIT 201, LIT 300, and LIT 494 do function well as foundational required courses in the option, with LIT 201 and LIT 300 teaching critical reading and writing skills that prepare students for the next stage of their program.

In our Year 0 Plan, we hypothesized that an option rotation for assessment would enable us “to assess learning at the beginning, middle, and end of students’ careers.” The student artifacts clearly demonstrated students’ developing critical reading and writing skills across the three levels of courses.  (Research skills were not taught in the LIT 201 and LIT 300 sections chosen for assessment.)

We also hypothesized that assessing all three program learning outcomes simultaneously would be productive “because in humanities work the outcomes are frequently interdependent and assessed using the same artifact.”  The student artifacts demonstrated that students are learning the essential interconnections between critical reading and writing skills in their courses.

  • What areas were identified that need improvement?

While the Research scores for LIT 494 met the threshold value, we would like to see the scores for this learning outcome to be in the 80-90% range, similar to the scores for Reading and Writing.  The department has had discussions in the past about setting research learning outcomes for different levels of courses, and the assessment results suggest that this would strengthen the critical skills taught in the Literature curriculum, particularly since we do not offer a 200-level research methods class.

Holding an assessment workshop enabled faculty to do much more than evaluate artifacts: as we discussed each artifact, we discussed our views of course learning goals, types of assignments, and the problems/questions we’ve encountered teaching these courses.  There was an added layer of complexity to these conversations because a number of the participants had taught two or three of the assessed courses.

These kinds of in-depth conversations about curricular goals and approaches have not taken place for a number of years among the Literature option faculty.  As will be detailed below, the Assessment Committee believes that continuing these conversations, capturing their results and making them available to faculty and students is vital for assessment to become an ongoing process that fosters a vital and responsive curriculum.

How We Responded

  • Describe how “What Was Learned” was communicated to the department, or program faculty.

The Assessment Committee led a faculty meeting on October 17 to discuss the results of the assessment and to begin discussing ways we can build curricular discussions into our work within each option and the department as a whole.  The Assessment Committee will also share this report with the faculty and ask for additional feedback.

The Assessment Committee will prepare a document for the Literature option faculty that records the information about course goals, learning outcomes, and approaches that were discussed during the assessment workshop.  This information in this document will be useful for articulating Option learning goals for courses.  The interconnected learning outcomes for LIT 201, LIT 300, and LIT 494 also create a template for examining connections between other areas of the Literature option curriculum and even individual courses.

  • How are the results of this assessment informing changes to enhance student learning in the program?

The committee expects that sharing this report with faculty and the option-specific feedback with Literature faculty will foster more conversations between faculty about curriculum throughout the academic year, and enable us to share this information with our students on our syllabi and in our classrooms.

Given the success of the assessment of the Literature option, the department has agreed to continue with our Year 0 Plan and assess the Writing option for 2023.

  • If information outside of this assessment is informing programmatic change, please describe that.

Our Year 0 Plan is ambitious in its scope, and receiving an Assessment Innovation and Effectiveness Grant has been crucial to enabling us to begin implementing the plan, one of the central goals of which is to increase faculty participation in the assessment process.

Funding from the Assessment Innovation and Effectiveness Grant made it possible for us to hold our assessment workshop in August.  Doing so allowed faculty to concentrate on this process independently of the class preparation, opening-weeks madness, and other professional priorities that they would have encountered had we waited to tackle this work until faculty were back on contract. It also allowed the assessment committee time to process results, share them with faculty for feedback, and integrate that feedback into this report.

Closing the Loop

Since this is the first year of our Year 0 Plan, we are thinking in terms of building the next part of the loop for our 2023 assessment.  The Assessment Innovation and Effectiveness Grant will enable us to add a step to the process for the next assessment cycle: the Assessment Committee will hold a workshop with Writing option faculty in January to prepare for the artifact collection at the end of the Spring 2023 semester.

The Assessment Committee will work with the Writing option faculty to set the date for the 2023 assessment workshop and with the department Chair to set the date for a faculty meeting in September 2023 to discuss the committee’s tentative findings.