Program Assessment Report
PROGRAM INFORMATION
Degree Program(s):
Department Chair:
Report Prepared by:
Next Self-Study due :
Department:
B.A.
Political Science
James Brent
Phone:
4-5550
Ken Nuger
Phone:
4-5346
2017
E-mail:
kpnuger@email.sjsu.edu
Note: Schedule is posted at: http://www.sjsu.edu/ugs/programplanning/
ARCHIVAL INFORMATION
Location:
Clark Hall, #471
Person to Contact:
(Bldg/Room #)
James Brent
4.5550
(Name)
(Phone)
Does the information (e.g., Mission, Goals, and/or Learning Outcomes) posted on the web (see,
http://www.sjsu.edu/ugs/assessment/programs/ ) for this program need to be updated?
No
If yes, please submit changes to jacqueline.snell@sjsu.edu
SCHEDULE OF ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES*
Please complete the schedule of assessment activities below by listing all program Student Learning
Outcomes (SLOs) by number down the left column.
.
When will data be collected? (must be
Semester the SLO is focus of efforts (no
at least once each program planning
PP cycle, each semester put this
cycle)
semester by the appropriate SLO)
SLOs
1
Breadth, ongoing
Spring, 2011
2
Application, ongoing
3
Disciplinary Methods, ongoing
4
Communication Skills, ongoing
Spring, 2010
5
Citizenship, ongoing
Page 1 of 8
Program Assessment Report
1. Learning Objective 4, Communication Skills: Written
Communication, Spring and Fall, 2009
BE SURE to enter the semester. This will become a progressive document to which you add information
each semester.
Initial Evidence of Student Learning:
The current political science department five-year program review is being finalized for
submission in the spring, 2010 and therefore, will begin a new program review period. We are mindful of
the recent suggestions and pleased with this new, simplified form provided by Undergraduate Studies to
construct our annual program assessment summary. Based on the assessment guidelines for Spring
2009 to Spring 2010, a memorandum to the Chairs and Assessment Coordinators from Jackie Snell
dated February 24, 2009 as well as a College of Social Sciences Assessment meeting conducted by Bob
Cooper, in his capacity as director of assessment for COSS and Ron Rogers, in his capacity as director of
Assessment for Undergraduate Studies, our department thought it prudent to accept WASC's
recommendation to assess written communication skills, which is our department's fourth learning
objective, for our Spring 2010 report. We last visited this learning objective in 2006. As we are all aware,
both from department, college and university level discussion, as well communications from WASC,
having our students write well remains a serious challenge. Since 2006, our department has had ongoing
discussions about how to try and improve our students' writing skills. The following represents a
summary of our efforts.
In our department's annual program assessment report dated October 1, 2006, our focus was
written communication. Using the rubric we developed at that time, we evaluated the written
communication skills of our seniors using the final research papers they submitted in their senior seminar,
a culminating and rigorous requirement for all of our graduating seniors. The rubric is attached at the end
of this report. At that time, our department's representatives on our curriculum committee read all 14
senior seminar papers and using our rubric, averaged the composite evaluation of the papers assessed
by the committee. On a five point scale, five representing competence well beyond normal expectations
for baccalaureate students in political science, to one, where a student does not meet normal
expectations, the first writing assessment of our graduating seniors seminar papers were averaged as
follows:
1. Student's work is free of technical errors: 2.47
2. Student clearly identifies and explains concepts related to politics, public administration, public policy
and law: 2.62
3. Student logically and clearly develops the thesis, arguments and/or theme of the written assignment:
2.38
4. Student correctly uses an acceptable attribution style, including footnotes, or parenthetical references,
as well as a complete bibliography or works cited section: 2.64
5. Composite assessment: 2.53
To summarize our first attempt to assess our students' writing abilities in 2006, our senior seminar
students fell between 3, student fully meets expectations for baccalaureate students in political science
and 2, student generally meets but in some respects, falls short of expectations for baccalaureate
students in political science.
Page 2 of 8
Program Assessment Report
Change(s) to Curriculum or Pedagogy:
Our initial efforts led us to conclude that most of our students' written communication skills were,
for the most part, barely adequate for a graduating senior in political science. We had hoped for evidence
of stronger written communication skills and since that initial assessment, our department has had
ongoing discussions about what we could reasonably do to help students improve their writing skills.
While not mandating changes with formal departmental policy, we started to be more vigilant in advising
students to take 100w in their junior year and we attempted to more vigorously monitor and supervise
student writing and encourage students to utilize the various writing support services offered at San Jose
State. As of this spring, 2010 semester, our department implemented a modest policy requiring a
statement in all syllabi about the importance of correct writing. While we are not requiring that everyone
utilize the same wording, we did create a model statement that would serve as a guideline for faculty to
construct their own commitment to correct writing statements for their syllabi. The model statement is
attached in the appendix.
Similarly, the department created a one-page handout, identifying the Writing Center, the Peer
Mentor Center and the Learning Assistance Resource Center as valuable on site resources students can
utilize to improve their writing. In addition, the handout identifies Owl, the Purdue writing Lab, A Research
Guide and the University of Wisconsin Writing Guide as three online resources we believe will help
students better understand what is expected of university level scholarly writing and offer opportunities
students can utilize to improve their writing skills.
While these changes are too new to currently assess, it is our hope that by having the department
and faculty continue to more openly discuss the importance of correct writing, we will make students more
aware early in their academic careers that writing skills are important to have and important to practice.
We hoped that our focus on student writing would help similarly make students focus more attention to
writing well. Assessing our current students’ writing abilities affords us an opportunity, as limited as it may
be, to make a judgment about whether our informal efforts are possibly helping our students’ writing skills.
Evidence of Student Learning after Change.
Our department continues to use our senior seminar final research papers as a means to assess
our department's five learning objectives. Per WASC and the university's recommendation, and using the
same writing rubric we used in 2006, we revisited our fourth learning objective, written communication
skills by assessing senior seminar papers from the spring and fall, 2009 semesters. The following
summarizes the curriculum committee’s efforts and findings. This year, the committee was composed of
six faculty members including the department chair. The six members were collapsed into three groups
of two, the goal being that each group of two faculty would independently read the same eight senior
seminar papers which we hoped would address data reliability issues. We hoped to evaluate 24 papers
from two semesters of senior seminars, eight papers per group and then take the average scores from
each group for each of the four writing criteria in our rubric. We fell short of that number, but ultimately
were able to use 13 senior seminar papers that were independently evaluated by two of the three groups.
One group evaluated seven papers, the eighth being an essay exam and not a paper; another group
evaluated six papers, with some confusion about which papers that group had to read that reduced the
number of papers evaluated by that group to six. Unfortunately the third group, consisting of the chair
and another committee member was supposed to also independently read a group of eight papers but
from the chair's perspective, there was overwhelming evidence to suggest his group mate did not
carefully read the papers, if at all, so at the discretion of the chair, the average from that group was
omitted from our initial evaluation. The following represents the average scores of 13 of 19 senior
seminar papers from the fall, 2009 semester.
1. Student work is free of technical errors: 3.57
2. Student clearly identifies and explains concepts related to politics, public administration, public policy
and law: 4.11
Page 3 of 8
Program Assessment Report
3. Student logically and clearly develops the thesis, arguments and/or theme of the written assignment:
3.8
4. Student correctly uses an acceptable attribution style, including footnotes, or parenthetical references,
as well as a complete bibliography or works cited section: 3.65
5. Composite assessment average: 3.78
If we include the scores of two papers read by only one committee member in one group and the scores
from eight papers evaluated by the chair from the department’s spring, 2009 senior seminar, the
averages for our four written communication goals are adjusted as follows:
1. Student work is free of technical errors: 3.5
2. Student clearly identifies and explains concepts related to politics, public administration, public policy
and law: 3.88
3. Student logically and clearly develops the thesis, arguments and/or theme of the written assignment:
3.52
4. Student correctly uses an acceptable attribution style, including footnotes, or parenthetical references,
as well as a complete bibliography or works cited section: 3.47
5. Composite assessment average: 3.59
Our committee was encouraged with these averages as they represent a significant increase
from the aggregate written communication scores from senior seminar papers evaluated in 2006. Fully
recognizing the methodological weaknesses raised by not using the first group of seniors evaluated, and
instead, making a judgment about our efforts to improve our students’ written communication skills from a
different group of seniors, possibly with different writing abilities, our committee was still encouraged with
the new data. At the very least, we are able to say that our sample of senior seminar papers generally
meet and in some areas exceed our department’s expectations for a baccalaureate degree in political
science. We believe that our faculty’s modest efforts to identify students who need help with their writing,
coupled with our recent efforts, stated above, to stress the need for polished writing has benefitted our
students and will inspire them to continually work at improving their writing skills. It is the committee’s
plan to periodically review our senior seminar papers to see if their written quality continues to match or
exceed our expectations for our graduating seniors.
Next year, however, our committee has chosen to focus our assessment efforts on our first
program learning objective, breadth of knowledge of political science. This will consist of examining the
results of our senior seminar substantive knowledge exit exam, as well as other more general indicators
of our students exposure and understanding of the four major substantive sub areas of political science.
Page 4 of 8
Program Assessment Report
Appendices
Appendix 1, Writing Rubric
Rubric for assessing written communication skills of our graduating majors
The following criteria shall be used to assess each identified written communication skill identified below.
5 = Student demonstrates competence well beyond normal expectations for baccalaureate students in
political science
4 = Student fully meets and in some regards exceeds expectations for baccalaureate students in political
science
3 = Student fully meets expectations for baccalaureate students in political science.
2 = Student generally meets but in some respects falls short of expectations for baccalaureate students in
political science.
1 = Student does not meet normal expectations for baccalaureate students in political science.
Written communication skills
1. The student's written work is free of technical writing errors.
2. The student clearly identifies and explains concepts related to politics, public administration, public
policy or law.
3. The student logically and clearly develops the thesis, argument and/or theme of the written
assignment
4. The student correctly uses an acceptable attribution style, including endnotes, footnotes or
parenthetical references, as well as a complete bibliography or works cited section.
Page 5 of 8
Program Assessment Report
Appendix Two, Writing handout
Department of Political Science
Writing assistance resources
Do you need assistance with your written assignments? The university provides excellent resources to
help you write high quality papers. You can also find some excellent resources online. We hope you will
find this list helpful.
At San Jose State:
1. The Peer Mentor Center, first floor Clark Hall
The peer mentor center is staffed with expertly trained undergraduate students, whose job is to assist
students in many different capacities, including writing assistance. You can drop in and arrange to meet
with one of the many peer mentors on duty. You can find out at: http://www.sjsu.edu/muse/peermentor/.
2. Writing Center, Clark Hall, Suite #126
The writing center will work with students in a one on one setting to help students in all phases of writing.
You can find out more at: http://www.sjsu.edu/writingcenter/.
3. Learning Assistance Resource Center, Student Services Center #600
The staff here will be happy to work with you and help you with your assignments. You can find out more
at: http://www.sjsu.edu/larc/resources/.
In addition to the excellent resources on campus, there are several academic websites that have
developed excellent online writing assistance programs. Three of the many well regarded of these online
cites are:
1. Owl, The Purdue University writing lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/.
2. A research guide for students: http://www.aresearchguide.com/index.html.
3. University of Wisconsin writing guide: http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/index.html.
In addition, reading a high quality newspaper on a regular basis will expose you to good, if not always
great writing and is highly recommended, especially for a political science major. The Wall Street Journal,
New York Times, Washington Post and realistically, any major sized city newspaper read on a regular
basis will, in the long run, help your writing skills.
Page 6 of 8
Program Assessment Report
Appendix Three, model writing statement for course syllabi:
Students of political science should develop the ability to write in clear, grammatical English.
Spelling and grammar count! The following guidelines and resources will help students avoid common
mistakes in spelling and grammar and provide useful information to help you craft university level
scholarship. Students must ensure that appropriate citations are used. Direct quotations must be so
indicated with quotation marks and a specific reference to the page in the source from which it was taken.
Ideas from others must also be referenced although quotations marks are inappropriate. Failure to cite
your sources constitutes academic misconduct which carries with it serious sanctions. A tutorial on
citations is available at the library website at
http://www.sjlibrary.org/services/literacy/info_comp/citing.htm.
For further writing assistance:
The SJSU Writing Center is staffed by professional instructors and upper-division or graduatelevel writing specialists from each of the several SJSU colleges. Writing specialists have met a rigorous
GPA requirement, and they are well trained to assist all students at all levels within all disciplines to
become better writers. It is your responsibility to arrange a time to meet with the instructors. Consult with
your professor in advance to determine whether you need assistance with your writing.
Arguably the best way to improve your own writing is to read quality material on a regular basis. To that
end, students are encouraged to read articles from scholarly sources but also newspapers such as The
Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Economist. These publications
also contain articles of direct relevance to their political science classes.
Page 7 of 8
Program Assessment Report
#N [Please add a page for each Student Learning Outcome in
program]
BE SURE to enter the semester. This will become a progressive document to which you add information
each semester.
Initial Evidence of Student Learning:
[SEMESTER/YEAR]
Change(s) to Curriculum or Pedagogy:
[SEMESTER/YEAR]
Evidence of Student Learning after Change.
[SEMESTER/YEAR]
Page 8 of 8