Campus Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes

What are the student learning outcomes in your unit?

The Psychology Department has 4 department specific student learning outcomes for student majors:

• Students will develop an understanding and appreciation of central facts and concepts in the field.
• Students will have an understanding and appreciation of the varieties of applied fields in Psychology.
• Students will develop and understanding and appreciation of research methods in Psychology.
• Students will learn to comprehend and produce scientific writing described by the APA style manual.

We use written classroom tests, term papers, laboratory experiences, research papers, service learning/internships, exit examinations, exit interviews, alumni surveys, career tracking of majors at graduation as measures for student learning outcomes. The Chart below shows our timetable and responsible parties for assessment. We also spend time on curriculum revision and on identifying ways to improve the student learning for our majors by identifying 1 issue to work on each year. The Department Chair heads this effort. Assessment Reports are submitted to the COAS office. The assessment outcomes are consistent with the campus’ General Education and overall Student Learning Outcomes.

Which outcome did you assess this academic year?

We worked on each of these outcomes within the past year.

How did you assess their skills before, during and / or at the end of the semester / academic year?

Psychology Assessment  Yr. 2008-09

Please summarize the data you have collected this semester / academic year.

We have collected departmentally developed exam scores from 110 students enrolled in the senior level labs for the years 2002-2008. This lab is our capstone course and is typically completed at the end of the student’s academic career. The Departmental Assessment Exam included 105 items organized according to the major content areas covered in typical Introductory Psychology courses, P101 and P102 at IU Northwest. The results can be seen below.

Our goal was to learn whether completing upper division courses in specific sub-disciplines within psychology leads to better performance on the related assessment or subscale items. Thus we would expect that in the subject areas in which there are a large number of students who enrolled in the course, the means would be higher than in those subject areas in which few students completed an upper division course. Our expectation was confirmed in some cases, e.g. we do not offer an upper division course in Intelligence, and indeed the mean score for the intelligence subscale items was only 47%.. However, while 100 percent of our students complete Research Methods as well as an advanced lab that presumably emphasizes research methods, the mean score for the corresponding items was a disappointing 68%.

Please describe any programmatic changes you have made or are planning to make based on the data you have collected.

We are revising our questions and are continuously trying to improve the content mastery within our upper level courses. One weakness of the assessment tool is that it includes only 3 items measuring knowledge of statistics (not included in the table above for this reason), a course required of all of our majors. Thus, we do not know how well our students are mastering important statistics concepts. We intend to review the data in a more refined way, e.g. to look at within-student correlations between completing an advanced course and scores on the subscales of the Departmental Assessment Exam. In addition, we intend to address the mastery of research methods by systematically including active learning of methods in all upper division courses. We have chosen to target research methods because many of our upper division courses have been designated as meeting the General Education goals for Advanced Scientific Reasoning.