Have formal Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) or Student Learning Outcomes (SLOS) been developed?
Yes
Published where? (website)
Administration of Justice webpage
Do PLOs include or imply link to Core Competency? (AY 2017-2018: Written Communication)?
Yes
Process of Core Competency Assessment:
Course (400- level)
POL 332
Assignment
Final essay
Type of Student Artifact
Essay
Rubric or other instrument
GE Rubric for Written Communication
Data (measurement of the competency)
See attachment
Action Taken in Response to the Data (What will you do in response to the Findings?)
Administration of Justice 2018 Written Communication Assessment
For Administration of Justice majors, the department has no capstone by which to analyze student writing directly ahead of graduation. In the absence of such a course, the department chose to use papers from Political Science 322: Criminal Justice, an upper-division required course for students majoring in Administration of Justice. Unfortunately, there were no papers assigned in AJ 101 for comparison, so this analysis uses papers from POLS 101 as a freshman-level benchmark for pretest/posttest written communication assessment. The papers were scored from 1-4 for each element of written communication: Line of Reasoning, Organization & Structure, Content, and Language/Prose/Syntax. The results for the 2018 assessment are in the table below.
| Data | POLS 101G | POLS 322 | Difference | F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Line of Reasoning | 2.727 | 3.182 | 0.455 | 4.412* |
| Organization and Structure | 2.455 | 2.864 | 0.409 | 3.216 |
| Content | 2.500 | 3.046 | 0.546 | 6.121* |
| Language / Prose / Syntax | 2.455 | 3.136 | 0.681 | 9.742** |
| n | 22 | 22 |
Note: * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001
Students improved in writing in every category, and these improvements were statistically significant in three of the four categories. The scores for POLS 322 fall below the scores for the POLS 470S Capstone Seminar, but this may be expected as POLS 470S is a higher -level class taken in the student’s last or penultimate semester. This underscores the importance of establishing an AJ Capstone seminar for the purpose of assessment.
Date of Last Program Review
2015