Abstract:
Faculty of Washington State University's undergraduate degree programs in Crop Science, Soil Science, and Horticulture initiated the development and implementation of an assessment process to gauge the extent to which WSU students in the plant and soil science programs meet university and program learning goals. This process was undertaken primarily to help improve our joint teaching efforts and students' learning; it also was encouraged by the needed documentation for the 2007 university accreditation and a need to better match our program learning goals with the University's newly developed Learning Goals of the Baccalaureate. The new program-level assessment plan focused on determining and documenting student progress and proficiency at the sophomore and senior levels. This paper describes the development process and results of the initial assessment cycle and how faculty from three degree programs were recruited and trained in the assessment of student research posters in the sophmore level course and oral presentations on soil-plant management plans in the senior level course. Average faculty ratings were 2.8 for the sophmore projects and 4.5 for the senior projects out of a possible 6 points across all rubric dimensions, with inter-rater reliability of 89 and 87%, respectively. Increased scores at the senior level suggest that student proficiency does increase as students progress through our curriculum and can be documented by rubrics of comparable evaluation criteria.
Keywords:
plant, soil, science, learning
 Download Article | [ ] | 137 kB |
