AAC&U News | September 2004

Evaluating Students' Best Work: SIUE Embeds Assessment in Capstone Learning Projects

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) requires a discipline-focused senior assignment of all its graduates. This capstone project is designed to ensure that all seniors have mastered those skills required in their undergraduate major as well as key liberal education skills all B.A. recipients should possess.

With an enrollment of 13,000, SIUE was established in 1956 and serves as one of four comprehensive universities in the metropolitan area of St. Louis. Typical of many comprehensive universities, most of its students begin their college studies at another institution. During the last five years, 57 to 63 percent of SIUE students have matriculated as transfer students, a fact that makes having a capstone project that measures students’ cumulative learning by graduation especially important.

Capstone Assessment and Ensuring Quality in Higher Education

With the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act slated for 2004, higher education issues are receiving more attention than usual from Congress and the media. Many are asking: Are colleges and universities doing enough to ensure that students are receiving a quality education and is the money being spent on college worth the price?

Answering these questions isn’t easy, in part because ensuring quality in U.S. higher education in the United States involves a complex and decentralized network of institutions and practices. This network includes state boards of education, regional accreditors, and institutions of higher education themselves all working together to ensure the quality of student learning. The complexity of this system makes it particularly difficult for external stakeholders to understand how different institutions ensure quality.

The story of the Senior Assignment (SRA) at SIUE provides one approach to assessment emerging from this complex network. In the 1980s, SIUE was invited by the North Central Higher Learning Commission to be part of the Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQUIP). AQUIP takes a proactive approach to self-assessment and provides opportunities for institutions to participate in peer review of new projects. A self-study in the early ‘80s at SIUE led to an assessment plan that was implemented over the next decade. By 1988, the school was one of 98 AQUIP charter members. In 2002, SIUE also began work with the Illinois Board of Higher Education to improve student learning. One conclusion that emerged from these interconnected efforts was that some assessment mechanism was needed to ensure that students were qualified in their discipline by their graduation.

The Senior Assignment: The Mutation of a Model

Douglas Eder, director of undergraduate assessment and program review and professor of biology, has overseen the assessment program at SIUE since 1993. He says one definition of his job is to keep administrative noses—including his own—out of departmental crafting of the senior assignment. As a graduate of The College of Wooster, Eder was familiar with the concept of a capstone qualifying assignment. Wooster has required such an assessment of all its students for many years.

SIUE adopted a similar model in order to ensure that all its students could prove mastery of their disciplinary subjects and key liberal learning skills. The SRA projects at SIUE vary widely by discipline and are high stakes—graduation depends on successful completion of them.

Creating these senior assignments also leads departments to examine and improve their course offerings, since the senior assignments are a way to determine whether students’ learning is aligned with learning goals the departments and the institutions have set.

Developing Effective Senior Capstone Experiences

One might say the crafting of the SRAs fit Samuel Beckett’s maxim of “try again, fail again, fail better.” Eder argues that their administrative “hands-off” approach seems to work very well. It is essential that senior projects be developed organically in the departments. They use a decentralized system in which this assessment method is “owned” by the faculty. “Our [assessment] activities match departmental goals,” says Eder, and he points out that a good senior project is a process—it may take a department three to five years to come up with a great model.

The development of the SRAs are embedded within overall program reviews. Three questions guide the process as well as a grid of checkpoints that match elements of the senior assignment to disciplinary learning goals and general education goals. The first question in this process asks:

The Senior Assignment (SRA), or Academic Simulator, is a scholarly inquiry between students and dedicated faculty members that results in a product or behavior. Because the product/behavior is visible, it and the curriculum that produced it can be assessed. A faculty can reflect upon the evidence of student learning so revealed and come to some conclusions about how its students learn. Upon reflecting on the evidence, what has your department discovered about student learning under its direction?

The program review survey then asks about next steps and how student feedback on the project influences implementation. It also asks for highlights regarding student achievement. Faculty members meet once a year to review all of their assessment efforts.

The Senior Assignment: Aviation and Six Elements

SIUE identifies six elements of the SRA that combine to make it unique:

The capstone assignments must be embedded in learning and teaching. The project for seniors must be embedded in the normal learning and teaching activities of the department. “The term academic simulator derives from the metaphor of the cockpit flight simulator in which assessment, teaching, and learning are all done at the same time,” says Eder. The senior assignment is like the flight simulator; the student the novice pilot; and the professor the flight instructor that guides the student and sets up scenarios for the student to solve. The engagement that happens between professor and student results in a behavior, and the behavior is the product. And because the product or the behavior is visible, the curriculum that produced it can be assessed. The analogy is that you would be more comfortable flying with a pilot who was trained on a flight simulator than with a pilot who had passed a multiple-choice test. “No standardized exams should serve as the only assessment device,” says Eder. In this model, a student’s learning is not assessed by a final exam, but how he or she demonstrates in practice an application of what they have learned over their entire undergraduate career.

The senior assignment must match the department's own learning goals. The projects vary widely by discipline and requirements are dictated by the needs of the discipline. The assessment office does not dictate to the disciplines what the students should know a particular field to earn a degree, nor does it do the assessment of students’ mastery of material for them.

The senior assignment is departmentally owned. According to the senior assignment Web site, the senior assignments are “departmentally owned, with issues such as academic expectations, faculty workload, and amount of credit, determined by the department.” Since the disciplines differ in their epistemologies—not every subject can be taught the same way, and departments are first “free to fail” and then learn from their mistakes.

Student’s senior assignments must be viewed by the whole faculty (and not relegated to a committee). SRAs are witnessed by the faculty in the major discipline and faculty members “face the consequences of their own curriculum” when they “witness” just what students have learned. In other words, all faculty review SRAs and discuss them and if they are disappointed with the work, it may indicate that a learning goal was not adequately addressed in the curriculum.

The SRA has high stakes for students. The evaluation of SRAs are a high stakes assessment. If students do not pass the SRA, they either fail to get a passing grade or fail to graduate.

The SRA ensures the achievement of key liberal education goals. The SRAs must have a liberal education component that taps into more than one discipline as well as discipline-specific goals. And many of the senior projects have an oral and writing skills component. “We sincerely think that liberal learning skills should be part of this demonstration of critical thinking, effective speaking, effective writing, problem solving, etiquette, and a variety of other components in all Senior Assignments,” says Eder.

The Senior Assignment: Different for Each Discipline

Because each discipline has its own epistemology, no two SRAs are alike in either structure or content. Foreign languages, for example, require an eight-page paper graded by the primary professor as well as two additional faculty members in the department taking into account both competence in the target language and the mastery of writing skills fostered in general education.

The engineering and business schools have experts from outside the university come in as adjudicators and assessors of senior assignments. The chemistry department—with the help of an endowed lectureship not funded by the assessment office—brought in Nobel-prize winning organic chemist Roald Hoffman to preside over a student Nobel symposium, where he gave a keynote address and functioned as the outside reviewer of SRAs.

For senior geography majors, the senior assignment focuses on a topic and requires the preparation of a map or maps, a paper, and a short visual and oral presentation before the faculty. The paper may address a student’s own topic of interest, a topic from a list prepared by the faculty, or a topic from an internship/co-op performed by the student. The presentation should incorporate or be related to the “five themes” or “four traditions” of geography.

The psychology department benefited greatly from assessing what their students were learning with the project. When they first worked with the Program Review office, students were only writing a five-to-seven-page paper for their senior assignment. After much work, students now participate in closely supervised research and present their findings in poster sessions at the Midwest Psychological Association annual meeting.

As a result of its ongoing program review, the art and design department has also dramatically enhanced its senior assignments in recent years. In 1995, they started taking their students to northern Mexico to learn that region’s traditional artisan crafts, such as tapestry, pottery, and painting. Students use these experiences to develop an entire exhibition. The exhibit involves creating and displaying the art pieces, marketing the exhibition, and drafting and writing copy for a catalog. Seniors also must defend their work in public to external evaluators thereby demonstrating their knowledge of the subject and their oral communications skills.

SIUE also uses data from the National Survey of Student Engagement each year to determine the level of student engagement from year to year. “We rise to the level of our expectations,” says Eder—who often refers to his role as “assessment steward” rather than director. He says the SRA process helps them to “keep our expectations high for all our students.”

For more information about the academic simulator model, visit www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/acasimul.html.