Program Assessment Guidelines

Effective for Academic Year 2009-2010

Program Assessment Reports will have the following components.

Goals and Strategies

For each of the three basic components of the program-1) undergraduate and graduate learning and instruction, 2) research and scholarship and, 3) service-- the report will describe the faculty's agreed-upon goals (what the faculty plans to achieve) and general strategies for accomplishing the goals.

Learning and Instruction

This section should specify the learning objectives, (i.e., what students should know and be able to do as a result of their experiences in the program) for each degree program and emphasis area in the department. It should also summarize the basic strategies, both curricular and co-curricular, the department employs to achieve student learning. For undergraduate programs, this section will be basically the same as the Major Field Plan for Assessing Student Learning.

Research and Scholarship

This section should concisely summarize the main goals for the various research and scholarship efforts of the program's faculty. It will likely be the most challenging part of the Program Assessment document to construct. The objective is to describe, in language that communicates to audiences outside the discipline, the department's overall research agenda, principal beneficiaries of the research, and general strategies for accomplishing the agenda. The document should not describe every research project and scholarly product, though accomplishments may be included in an appendix. A successful document will provide the Dean, the Provost and other audiences external to the department with a clear summary of the department's current research and scholarship and a view of where the department would like to be in the near future.

Service

The service component of faculty members' work will also vary widely depending on how the department defines service, which might include extension and other outreach efforts, service to the institution, service to the disciplines and more. The key to this section is for the program to specify what kinds of service faculty members perform, what the service is intended to accomplish, and the general strategies for coordinating faculty service efforts. Again, the section should be a concise summary-not a list of activities-written for the Dean, the Provost and external (non-disciplinary) audiences.

5-year Program Data Profile

The MU Institutional Research Office will provide programs with the most recent 5 years of data for Students (counts of majors and degrees granted, student credit hour totals) generated), Employees (counts of faculty and staff), and Expenditures. Some units may have additional information and data that will add to the assessment process. This material should be used to support the goals and strategies.