Central American Studies Annual Assessment Report to the College 2016-2017

Abstract

The Central American Studies 2016-17 annual assessment report to the College of Humanities for the Office of Academic Assessment and Program Review. The department participated in the College of Humanities college-wide assessment of the Stretch Writing program, while conducting a further assessment of its General Education Basic Skills courses in written communication and oral communication. Noting that the COH Stretch Writing assessments revealed a statistically significant achievement gap between students in 114B and 113B (11.72 and 9.57, respectively), the report observes that "This finding is in line with expectations that students in 114B sections should be able to write better than those in 113B sections, the latter having more challenges to overcome." Agreeing with the COH assessment finding that, with students in 113B performing below the benchmark score of 10, "there is room for improvement in the Stretch courses," the report observes that "additional funding would be required to provide stipends for faculty workshops, tutoring for students, or additional training for Supplemental Instructors" in order to close the loop on this student learning deficit. In addition, performing its own program-specific assessments of student writing in CAS 113a/b, CAS 114 a/b, and CAS 115, the department found that "In a scale from 1-4 (4 being excellent) . . . students enrolled in CAS 113b received an average score of 1.94, students enrolled in CAS 114b received an average score of 2.01, and students enrolled in CAS 115 received an average score of 2.17" —scores that faculty discussion suggests were "low due to the way the rubric was written, and the expectation that faculty had of excellence being measured at an advanced level and not as part of an introductory course." CAS 151: Fundamentals of Public Speaking was assessed via "a common assignment that incorporated public speaking tasks with non-Western methods of public speaking, including traditional Maya storytelling concepts." Addressing GE SLOs 2, 3, and 4 for oral communication, the assessment resulted in an "overall score of 70/100, obtaining much higher scores in GE SLO2 (create, organize) and GE SLO4 (delivery) than in GE SLO3 (evaluation of contexts)." Faculty discussion suggests that the lower scores (specific SLO scoring breakdowns are not indicated) were due to "expectations corresponding to an intermediate or advanced level rather than an introductory level public speaking course." Plans for 2017-18 include assessments of lower division and upper division writing proficiencies.