Assessment Report for French Studies Program in Fall 2005, Exams of French Philology

Download Assessment Report for French Studies Program in Fall 2005 and more Exams French Philology in PDF only on Docsity! Date Received Fall 2005 Semester Assessment Report Form DUE March 31st, 2006 Directions: Please complete a form for each of the programs within your department. This form was designed to provide a format for assessment reporting and should not be used to limit the amount of information provided. Each box that is attached to each of the sections is designed to adjust to varying lengths. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Bea Babbitt at x51506 or via email at: bea.babbitt@unlv.edu. 1. Program Information: Program French Studies Department Foreign Languages College Liberal Arts Program Assessment Coordinator Margaret Harp Associate Professor of French Semester Data Collected Fall 2005 Report Submitted by Margaret Harp Associate Professor of French Phone/email 895-4227/margaret.harp@unlv.edu Date Submitted March 31, 2006 2. According to the Assessment Plan for this program, what were the planned assessments to be conducted during the 2005-2006 Academic Year? You may want to copy and paste from this program’s assessment plan. Which outcomes for this program were measured? How did you measure the outcomes? What results did you expect? If the students performed well what would their performance look like, i.e. percentages, means, or comparisons to a national standard? __1__outcome out of a total of _5__ outcomes evaluated this semester. Students completing a French Studies major should be able to write grammatically and lexically accurate French. They should be able to express themselves on general topics, and to write analytically on literary and cultural topics. Essay sections of Final Exams for FREN 300, FREN 301, FREN 341 Course grades ACTFL Advanced Writing Guidelines (attached) B or above 3. Results, conclusions, and discoveries. What are the results of the planned assessments listed above? What conclusions or discoveries were made from these results? Describe below or attach to the form. Results, conclusions, and discoveries Results For the three different classes, course grades indicate students have a solid command of requisite vocabulary and demonstrate good grammatical structures beyond those required by the ACTFL guidelines. Of 46 students, 31, or 67%, received a grade of B or better. These courses required weekly written homework, at least two longer compositions, and multiple tests requiring written essays of varying lengths. All other grades were passing, with the lowest grade being a C-. There was a total of 3 withdrawals. Analysis of the written final examinations in these courses indicate that students can express themselves correctly and, at times, eloquently under testing conditions. The range of the target vocabulary for the given courses is particularly strong. Most of the errors were spelling or gender errors. It is noticeable that students do not use sufficiently object pronouns in order to provide shorter and more succinct sentences. For essay questions, students, overall, provided coherent, well-structured arguments. Details supporting their answers were more than adequate, indicating good preparation and familiarity with the subject matter. Critically-minded conclusions, however, were periodically weak. Conclusions In general, the results suggest that the French Studies section is meeting its expectations for writing skills. Courses need to continue honing students’ writing skills with the following goals in mind:  Engage students in more synthetic, rather than expository, writing exercises and projects;  Prepare our students better to use diverse grammatical and morphological structures;  Have all our students do B or better work in upper-division courses. Discoveries The assessment process has underscored the following discoveries: 1) There is a small but significant number of students who register as auditors for the upper-division FREN classes. In Fall 2005, with one exception, they were active course participants who completed all assignments, earned high grades and who even took the final exams. We need to poll such students to learn why they prefer Auditor