2014-2015 Annual Program Assessment Report
College: Humanities
Department: Philosophy
Program:
Major
Assessment liaison:
1.
Kristina Meshelski
Please check off whichever is applicable:
A. ____X____ Measured student work.
B. ________ Analyzed results of measurement.
C. ____X____ Applied results of analysis to program review/curriculum/review/revision.
2. Overview of Annual Assessment Project(s).
In our last assessment report, we detailed the results of four years’ worth of measurement of student work, in which we found that our
majors perform well according to our standards, but that they do not improve during the course of the major. We came away with
some concerns about our previous measurement methodology and the homogeneity of our majors. We decided to focus this year on
experimenting with new measurement procedures, and applying the results of our analysis to make changes that would both make the
major more welcoming to underrepresented groups and improve the performance of the students we have.
Option A:
Our goal was to begin to use the Electronic Assessment System (EAS) to build a repository of our student’s work and facilitate
measurement of student work that does not rely on instructors measuring their own students. What we found is that the EAS does not
currently function well enough to make this possible, and in fact it lacks many capabilities that we had anticipated.
We have sent a list of the problems to Jack Soloman (see attached) and hope that they will be corrected for the future. In the
meantime we will have to measure student work without the aid of the EAS.
Option C:
On the diversity of our major:
We continue to offer some of our newer courses at the 100 and 200 level in hopes that this increases the likelihood of students from
underrepresented groups taking a philosophy class within their first few years at CSUN, and hopefully, deciding to pursue a major.
These courses were “Philosophy and Popular Culture” and “Human Nature and the Meaning of Life”.
We also hired two new philosophers who specialize in Continental Philosophy, and we have added two new experimental courses at
the 300 level “Contemporary Continental Philosophy” and “Bioethics” that will likely be taught primarily by our new hires. Because
continental philosophy is characterized by a response to the Enlightenment and the particular ethical problems of the 20th century and
beyond (including colonialism and genocide), these courses will diversify the authors our students read and the ideas they confront. In
addition to the fact that we are now able to offer courses on this important sub-field of philosophy, we hope the addition of these
courses makes our major more attractive and welcoming to underrepresented groups.
Philosophy Assessment Report 2014-2015, page 2
In the process of re-doing the department website, we added a “Careers” section to our website to provide resources for students who
may be hesitant to choose a major that isn’t “practical”. This section gives evidence that philosophy majors perform well, and even
better than most majors, on measures of lifetime earning power and performance on graduate school entrance exams.
We continue to discuss the diversity of our major informally and formally in our Climate Committee.
On the performance of the current majors:
We had a brown bag session specifically to discuss our capstone class, Phil 497, in which students write a senior thesis. Despite the
results of the previous assessment study finding that students graduate performing well according to our SLOs, many of the instructors
of the capstone course have the sense that students do not write good papers for their senior thesis, so we held this brown bag session
to compare notes and discuss what could be done.
We found that most instructors of the capstone course felt disappointed in their student’s work overall, with only one of the faculty
members in attendance reporting satisfaction with student’s work. A number of ideas for what to do were brainstormed; three notable
ones are now being implemented.
1. We are appointing a department academic advisor to help students plan their classes.
2. We are testing a pilot tutoring program. For now we have one 400 level class that is required to put in tutoring hours helping
students in either a particular section of Phil 100 or a particular section of Phil 150. If this goes well we hope to expand.
3. One of our gateway courses “Epistemology” is currently being team-taught in an experimental style in which students must
work in groups and do extensive independent research every week.
3.
Preview of planned assessment activities for next year
We plan to measure the success of the new tutoring program. Preliminary plans are underway to compare the tutored section of 100
with another simultaneous section taught with the same syllabus by the same professor that did not have tutoring. And to compare the
tutored section of 150 with past section of 150 taught with the same syllabus by the same professor.
We plan to collect electronic copies of student work so that if EAS is developed further we can upload the work to the repository. If
EAS is not developed we can keep these copies ourselves for later measurement. In addition to measuring the gateway courses to
compare to the 400 level courses, we hope to eventually be able to track individual students so we can compare, say, those who took
the current Epistemology course and those who did not.
Philosophy Assessment Report 2014-2015, page 3
Attachment: Email to Jack Soloman detailing problems with EAS
Kristina Meshelski
Sep 5
<kristina.meshelski@csun.edu>
to James
Ok, in that case it would be easiest for me to start with an email, but if we need to talk more I can meet in person. Also let me know if anything is unclear.
Here are the concerns I have, listed roughly with most important first:
1. When doing a study, the system flags discrepancies between assessors only in total scores on the rubric. For philosophy, given our rubric, this is not
useful at all - we were hoping that the system would flag discrepancies for each line on the rubric.
2. Given that we are a small major, we won't have enough data unless we can put up assignments from past semesters - right now the system is only
allowing us to upload papers from Spring 2015, though we can add courses from other semesters, we can't put up any assignments from other semesters.
3. Individual instructors should have the ability to add courses, given that the system doesn't include most courses that people are teaching, it would be a
lot of work for me as assessment liaison to add everyone's courses, but not that hard for them to add their own.
4. We were hoping to have the ability to see the description of the assignment while doing a study - in some studies that would be useful.
5. There seem to be at least some students not in the system at all - we found two philosophy majors that it didn't recognize, and there is no function to
add them manually, even if we know their student id number.
6. When trying to distinguish between students with the same name, it would be easier to search by student email, or id number, rather than their csun
username, which most instructors don't have access to.
7. When adding courses, there is no option to write in the semester, only a drop down menu, and that menu includes only part of 2010, 2012, 2014, and
part of 2015. Also we don't yet have access to the current semester, Fall 2015, at all. So while we might have liked to start asking students to upload
their own papers now, we can't.
Thanks for your attention to this, hope it helps.
Best,
Kristina
Philosophy Assessment Report 2014-2015, page 4