The degree to which ULV senior projects, master’s and doctoral dissertations meet the University’s mission statement was discussed in the Oct. 7 faculty research lecture series.
The results showed that undergraduate senior projects settled mostly in the low attainment category while doctoral dissertations and master’s theses reached moderate and high attainment levels.
The lecture, “Mission Impossible? Institution-Wide Rubric Assessment of Capstone Projects,” featured Aghop Der-Karabetian, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor psychology; Jeanne Flora, associate professor of speech communication and chairwoman of the speech communication department; and Marga Madhuri, associate professor of education.
The fourth speaker, Yingxia Cao, director of institutional research, was unable to attend the lecture.
All three speakers stressed that they expected the higher education scores to score better than undergraduates.
“I need to blame Al Clark,” joked Der-Karabetian at noon in the President’s Dining Room. “He had the vision that we could take projects and do something like this.”
Clark, associate vice president of Academic Affairs, is not only attributed for encouraging the first of its kind rubric assessment, but he is also responsible for organizing this year’s weekly faculty research lecture series.
“This lecture encompasses an institution-wide assessment of mission elements,” Clark said.
“The four elements of the mission statement assessed were diversity and community, values and orientation, lifelong learning and writing skills,” Madhuri said.
According to Der-Karabetian, the next step in the scoring process was to determine each specific type of project or dissertation, as there were different ways to grade diversity for each type of project.
“We assessed these various project types: empirical, applied, theoretical, strategic analysis, and creative and artistic expression,” Der-Karabetian said.
The topics, throughout the three levels of education, ranged from science to music and theater projects, Madhuri said.
A group of 16 faculty administrators was involved to critique a random selection of 62 projects of varying academic focuses in the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels.
“Four faculty members evaluated projects at each degree level, and two faculty evaluated each project, compared notes and arrived at a rating scale for each grading category,” Madhuri said.
Furthermore, the faculty evaluators came from different areas of ULV’s broad academic curriculum.
“These were cross-college faculty teams in order to get different perspectives on each project,” Madhuri said.
The rubrics grading scale rated projects on a four-point scale; a score of one meaning the project was undeveloped and four meaning the project had accomplished all areas of the mission statement.
According to Flora, the faculty ratings were divided into overall institutional ratings and results by school level and type of project.
“Only 50-60 percent of the projects received levels three to four,” Flora said.
Two areas where undergraduate projects earned moderate scores were in writing mechanics and writing format, Flora said.
One audience member asked whether the students knew they were being assessed on these areas of the mission statement.
Der-Karabetian replied, “Neither student or professor knew they would be analyzed by this criteria without the precondition they were supposed to include the mission statement goals in their thesis.”
The speakers said they would like to continue the rubric again this spring and eventually have the University decide whether it would like to contain more of the rubrics grading scale to determine the final grade of the project.
“If the rubric is implemented, we need to encourage the faculty to advise students to include the values areas of the mission into their projects,” Der-Karabetian said. “From there, what we need is to to see if the data supports the shift in project focus.”
As to whether Der-Karabetian’s “conceptual framework for colleges” can be worked into the classroom, teachers are the keys to instilling these areas of importance into their students’ curriculum while completing projects.
A complete list of the assessments can be found on the Institutional Research Web site, www.ulv.edu/ir.
Lesley Michaels can be reached at lesley.michaels@laverne.edu.
Lesley Michaels
