Lawrence B. Lewis & Elizabeth Yost Hammer
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The Personal Mission Statement Writing Assignment
The assigned personal mission statement is a general, comprehensive essay that includes
academic, career, and personal goals. The five-page statement includes referenced research.
Grades are based on writing style and the manner in which the students present their goals
and values as well as the degree of thoughtfulness and reflection. Students are not evaluated
on their actual goals and values.
The mission statement addresses three major themes: academic goals, career goals, and
personal goals/commitments. As part of preparing the students to write their statements,
we include a number of in-class presentations and small-group activities focused around
the three themes. For the academic goals section, a university staff member from the aca-
demic support center gives a presentation on study skills and time management. We also
engage in classroom activities designed to facilitate discussion about the university’s mis-
sion statement and expected outcomes for graduates. For the career goals section, we invite
a panel of professional psychologists to campus to discuss their experiences. In addition,
we host a panel of former psychology majors who went on to pursue professions outside
the field of psychology (e.g., medicine, law enforcement). Both panels address how their
undergraduate psychology training prepared them for their work, and panelists give sug-
gestions to the students on how they could make the best use of time while in college. For
the personal values section, we invite faculty and staff affiliated with campus ministry to
engage the students in thinking about the role of personal principles and values for their
own personal development.
After these introductory experiences addressing academic, career, and personal goals,
faculty and peer writing tutors from the university’s writing center work with the students
on how to translate their ideas into a structured writing assignment. The mission state-
ment assignment is completed in drafts to give students opportunities to improve their
writing skills and progressively refine their ideas. (See Table #2.1 for some examples of
in-class and brainstorming exercises for each section. Excerpts from a completed mission
statement appear in the Appendix.)
Assessing the Outcomes of Writing the Mission Statement
Seventy entering first-year declared psychology majors at a southern Jesuit liberal arts
university served as participants. All were traditional-aged students. To examine writing
improvement, a sample of 10 students’ writing was assessed at three points in time: a pre-
writing sample before entering the project, a sample at the end of the first semester, and a
final sample at the end of the academic year. At the end of the academic year, two English
Department faculty members uninvolved with the project independently evaluated each
sample using a rubric developed to assess each of the following writing skills, using a
6-point composite scale: the strength of thesis, effectiveness of organization, development
of ideas and evidence, strength and clarity of argument, and grammatical and mechanical
correctness.