SLO 4: A graduate student should be able to write up his or her research in the form of multiple
manuscripts for publication in scientific journals. Link to UNCW Learning Goals: thoughtful expression,
information literacy, critical thinking) and inquiry.
SLO 5: A graduate student should be able to create new teaching materials. Link to UNCW Learning
Goals: thoughtful expression, critical thinking, information literacy, and to some extent global citizenship.
We now have separate assessment plans and tools for each of our graduate degree programs. We
began in 2007 by assessing our two Master’s programs together, and only SLO3 for our Ph.D. program.
However, by 2009 we had established separate assessment plans and tools for all programs, and began
collecting data (where possible) on all SLOs. Programmatic outcomes were also established in 2009.
The Assessment tools (forms to be filled out by faculty) are provided in Appendix 5. The CAS formal
assessment reports are also provided in Appendix 6.
h. RESULTS OF ASSESSMENT AND ACTIONS TAKEN
We have been formally collecting and evaluating graduate student performance since 2007.
Overall, we are happy to report that our students are performing at or above expectations for the majority
of their student learning outcomes, across all graduate degree programs. Since 2007, we have identified
several issues associated with graduate program assessment, which have either stemmed from concerns
over student performance in selected program elements, or from problems related to the assessment process
itself.
- Poor faculty compliance in completing assessment tools. When formal graduate program assessment
began in 2007, faculty were provided with paper forms to evaluate student performance, which were to be
returned to the graduate secretary and the graduate assessment coordinator. Low numbers of responses for
many of the SLOs prompted the graduate assessment coordinator to move the assessment tools to online
surveys, beginning in the 2010-2011 year. This action had the desired effect of greatly increasing the
number of faculty responses to assessment requests, and also made it much easier to tabulate assessment
data. In 2012, we had low returns again on several of our SLOs. In response, the graduate assessment
coordinator prepared a “milestones for assessment” document to remind faculty of the points in a student’s
program at which assessment is required. Compliance in 2013 and 2014 was improved over 2012. - Limited data for our Ph.D. program. Compared to our Master’s programs, the Ph.D. program is
relatively small, leading to none/low responses for many of the SLOs each year. Thus it is impossible to
detect trends over time, on a year-to-year basis, for this program. Due to the nature of this program, there is
not a specific action we can take to correct this issue. We will require many years of data collection, and
pooling of multiple years, before we will be able to follow any trends in performance in this program. - Student performance on the oral exam in the M.Sc. program(s). In 2007, we first evaluated student
performance on this SLO (#2) to be lower than expectations. Similar results in 2008 prompted several
actions for the 2008-2009 academic year. First, faculty advisors took informal steps to correct this
problem, such as encouraging students to interact more with committee members, helping to focus
studying, and the implementation of “mock” (practice) oral exams with fellow graduate students. We also
initiated the implementation that year of SLO 1b to evaluate the students’ abilities to present and discuss
their research, in an attempt to better understand the poor performance in SLO2. In 2009 this SLO was
again identified as an area of low performance. The Graduate Advisory Committee was charged with
generating suggestions on how to improve student performance on this SLO. In 2010, performance was
still low. The faculty decided to implement more formal programmatic changes, by changing BIO 501
(Introduction to Science as a Profession, required for all M.Sc. students) to focus more on scientific
communication. In 2011, we noted considerable improvement in student performance on this SLO, which