Assessment Report
July 1, 2007 – June 30, 2008
DEPT / PROGRAM ASSESSED:
Graduate Program, History
ASSESSMENT COORDINATOR: Paul Douglas Lockhart
YEAR 4 of a 5 Year Cycle
1. ASSESSMENT MEASURES EMPLOYED
For this year’s (2007-08) Assessment of the History Department’s Graduate Program, the
measures employed are similar—but not identical—to those utilized for the previous
assessment. The measures employed for the current Assessment are as follows:
--Student Paper Portfolios
--informal contacts with alumni of the graduate program
--regular contacts with recent graduates of the graduate program
Formal exit interviews and exit questionnaires were not performed for this Assessment,
owing in large part to overwhelming personal issues that distracted the Graduate Director
from attending to these measures in the Spring Quarter 2008. In last year’s assessment,
written alumni surveys were also used, but as they are only meant to be administered
every five years (in accordance with the Program Assessment Plan, they are not included
in this Assessment.
Prof. Lockhart is the principal coordinator for this Assessment. Members of the History
Department’s Graduate Studies Committee also participated in the evaluation of the
Student Paper Portfolios.
2. ASSESSMENT FINDINGS
1. Graduates will communicate a sophisticated knowledge of History and disseminate it
to the general public through publications (in books, journals, magazines, newspapers)
and in Public History forums (presentations, displays, projects, websites, mass media).
Findings: The Assessment finds that Objective 1 has been met. None of our students have
produced significant publications in Year 4, but students from the Public History track
have been extraordinarily active in the presentation of museum exhibits nationwide.
Current students have been active in this regard as well, presenting exhibits at such
venues as the Ohio Statehouse and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural
Center (Wilberforce).
2. Graduates will encourage others to explore and understand the historical context of
their lives through public contact in societies, historical organizations, community and
social groups, museums and archives.
Findings: The Assessment finds that Objective 2 has been met. Thanks in large part to the
enthusiastic and capable leadership of our Public History director, Dawne Dewey,
1
graduates and current students alike have been very active in the annual meetings of
major professional associations, including the Ohio Academy of History, the Society of
American Historians, and the Society of American Archivists. This year alone, several of
our students presented papers at the annual meeting of the Ohio Academy of History.
3. Graduates will continue to develop their own appreciation and knowledge of History
through contact and friendship with other historians (through the department, alumni, and
professional organizations), and through a continued quest for knowledge by readings
and perhaps archival research.
Findings: The Assessment finds that Objective 3 has been met. Dawne Dewey’s active
solicitation of news from our Public History alumni (who remain by far the vast majority
of our graduate students and graduates) demonstrates that our graduates are maintaining
close professional ties with historians at other institutions, and—again, largely thanks to
Ms. Dewey—the alumni have continued to keep in close contact with fellow WSU
graduates.
4. Students who desire to do so will be prepared to matriculate into Ph.D. programs or
teach; Graduates in the Public History plan will be qualified to obtain employment in
historical organizations, archives, or museums.
Findings: The Assessment finds that Objective 4 has been met. Of the seventeen students
who graduated with the MA in History from our department in the period under
consideration, twelve have found employment (all within the Public History field). The
status of four of the remaining five students is unknown. Our one thesis plan student who
defended her MA thesis this year has already been accepted into the Ph.D. program at
Oxford to study under the direction of a prominent naval historian there.
The Assessment has also addressed the five Learning Outcomes listed in the program’s
Assessment Plan. The basis for this evaluation rests primarily upon the Student Paper
Portfolios. Each of these individual Portfolios includes final papers from the required
Historical Methods course (HST700) and papers from a variety of 700-level graduate
seminars. The Department was more successful this year than in previous years in
collecting papers from these classes. The papers in these portfolios were read and
evaluated by members of the department’s Graduate Studies Committee.
1. Students will display the analytical, research, and writing skills required to
address historical research problems in a long research paper or thesis.
2. Students will be able to read critically and assess historical scholarship in their
fields of study.
As in last year’s assessment, this Assessment takes these two Learning Outcomes
together as a single one. They are too closely related to allow them to be judged
separately, and the way in which the Student Paper Portfolios have been evaluated in the
past two assessment cycles precludes making a clear distinction between them. The
papers in each Student Paper Portfolio were instead rated in three categories: “Clarity of
2
Writing,” “Cogency of Ideas,” and “Quality of Research.” In each category, each paper in
each Portfolio was given a score (low to high) of 1 to 10. In the program’s Assessment
Plan, the benchmarks for “success” in this evaluation would be as follows: (a)a score of
six or higher in any category would rate as an acceptable level of performance; (b)at least
ninety percent of the Portfolios would be required to meet that level (6) or above in the
evaluation process.
Measured by these benchmarks, Learning Outcomes 1 and 2 were met successfully. All
of the student portfolios (100%) met or exceeded the minimum acceptable level of “6” in
each of the three evaluated categories. The mean score for all students for all three of the
individual criteria ranged between 8 and 9—just as in last year’s assessment—while the
grand mean for all categories taken together was 8.3, slightly down from last year’s
figure of 8.6. According to these scores, the Student Paper Portfolios indicate that our
students in 2007-08 demonstrated the requisite abilities to analyze, research, and write
about historical problems and questions, and have the skills necessary to read and
critically analyze historical scholarship in their fields of study.
3. Students in the Public History plan will have the requisite skills, knowledge, and
experience to work as a professional [sic] in an historical organization, archives or
museum.
4. Students in the Public History Program will be able to take complex historical
phenomena and present it [sic] in a way that makes it acceptable to the public
while not compromising its complexity.
As with Learning Outcomes 1 and 2—and as evaluated in last year’s assessment—this
Assessment takes these two closely related Learning Outcomes together. Although this
year’s Assessment—unlike last year’s—does not have the data provided by the written
alumni surveys, Dawne Dewey has kept in touch with nearly all of our graduating Public
History students—who comprise the vast majority of our MA students—and so we have
a sense of the success of our Public History students. Of the fifteen students who
received the MA in Public History during the assessment period, twelve (80%) are
employed in full-time positions at museums, archives, or libraries. One of them managed
to secure a prestigious position at the Terra Foundation for American Art at the
Smithsonian Institution. Our current students have likewise performed admirably in a
variety of internships; the reports from those internships, as well as project reports,
demonstrate that Learning Objective 4 has been successfully fulfilled.
5. Students will have a solid historiographical knowledge of their specialty or topic
fields, with a thorough understanding of the major historical arguments and
schools of thought that have shaped historiographical debates.
The department’s Graduate Studies Committee evaluated and passed two Course
Intensive Track Paper Projects during the academic year, and one Thesis Track student
successfully defended his thesis, confirming that this final Learning Outcome has been
fulfilled.
3
3. PROGRAM IMPROVEMENTS
The Findings of this Assessment demonstrate steady progress in the areas of Program
Improvement suggested in Year 1 of the assessment cycle. Job placement within the
Public History track—and placement of current students in prestigious internships within
the same track—show that students in our program are being more than adequately
prepared for their professional careers. In last year’s assessment, the issue of graduate
seminars—in particular, the frequency with which they are offered—was addressed; over
the past few years, course offerings at the 700-level were inadequate to the demand for
them. Far too many students were compelled to take seminars on topics that were well
outside their chosen areas of concentration. We are addressing this issue seriously this
year, and in a number of ways: (1)allowing Public History students to take seminars in
non-US fields (something that was not previously allowed under Public History track
requirements) and (2)refashioning many of our current non-US history seminars so that
they include a significant US history component—thereby making these seminars useful
to Public History students and other MA students who have chosen US history as their
primary field.
4. ASSESSMENT PLAN COMPLIANCE
There has been marked improvement in the major problem noted in the previous year’s
assessment—namely, the lack of papers included in the Student Paper Portfolios.
5. NEW ASSESSMENT DEVELOPMENTS
Although no new measures of assessment have been added this year, Dawne Dewey’s
close monitoring of our Public History program alumni has added greatly to our ability to
assess the success of students from that track.
4