Kevin J. Apple et al.
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their recommendations for a guiding list of learning goals and outcomes for an under-
graduate psychology major (Halonen et al., 2002). Specifically, the Task Force proposed a
list of 10 goals to reflect the learning expectations that students should achieve by the
completion of an undergraduate degree in psychology. Most notable for the current
chapter was the inclusion of Goal 3 (Critical Thinking) as one of the important 10 goals
to promote in our undergraduate training.
Jane Halonen, who served as both the chair of the Task Force on Undergraduate
Psychology Major Competencies and the chair of JMU’s psychology department, chal-
lenged and partnered with our assessment committee to develop an assessment tool to
measure student growth on all 10 goals. This challenge led to the development of an APA
undergraduate learning goal self-reflection exercise that incorporated a mixed-method
approach (Creswell, 2002), enabling us to collect quantitative and qualitative data on each
of the 10 goals. We provided students a brief definition of each goal and a list of example
learning outcomes associated with that goal. Then to obtain quantitative data, students
rated how strongly they agreed that they had achieved each goal and rated how strongly
they thought JMU’s undergraduate psychology program provided opportunities to achieve
each goal. Next, to obtain qualitative data, we asked students to offer open-ended feed-
back explaining their quantitative ratings for each goal and to list particular experiences or
recommendations that they had to help achieve this goal. (See Appendix 1 for the general
directions for the APA goal self-reflection exercise and Appendix 2 for how the critical
thinking goal was presented to participants.)
Based on the quantitative data from the self-assessment, students agreed that they had
achieved Goal 3 (Critical Thinking). Specifically, students in 2004 (M = 4.38, SD = .76)
and in 2005 (M = 4.19, SD = .77) rated their agreement with the first question (“I think
that I achieved this goal”) quite high. Similarly, an inspection of students’ responses to the
second statement (“JMU’s psychology program provided opportunities to achieve this
goal”) revealed a similar pattern. Students in 2004 (M = 4.17, SD = .95) and in 2005
(M = 4.10, SD = .85) rated strong agreement with this statement.
We should note that our students did not rate all 10 goals as favorably as Goal 3 (Critical
Thinking). As a result, we used students’ lower ratings on other goals to motivate a number
of changes to our undergraduate program. Specifically, we added new courses to our cur-
riculum to help students achieve the goals that they rated low. In addition to highlighting
which areas of our curriculum are in need of improvement, another benefit to assessing
the self-reflection exercise on APA goals each year is that we can use the quantitative data
to track whether changes to the program are having the intended impact of increasing
students’ ratings in subsequent years.
In addition, the qualitative data for the APA self-reflection exercise have provided us
great insight into understanding how our curriculum impacts learning on each goal, like
Goal 3 (Critical Thinking). When coding the open-ended data, we followed Creswell’s
(2002) recommendations of first reading through the text, dividing the text into more
meaningful segments, labeling each text segment with a one or two word code, and reduc-
ing the number of codes into overarching themes. In our first pass through the Goal 3
(Critical Thinking) data, we noticed a general trend where students’ comments were
positive, negative, or mixed about our department’s ability to promote critical thinking.
For example,