University of Nebraska Kearney

Biology Graduate Program Assessment Report 2003 

To date, the Department of Biology has implemented two out of four of our proposed assessment tools for the Masters Program in Biology.

Research Presentation

The Department has successfully implemented the assessment rubric for graduate student seminars 

Students are expected to prepare and present a 45-60 minute PowerPoint presentation for credit in Biology 880, Seminar. The seminars are attended by graduate faculty and graduate students and are presented on Friday afternoons in the Continuing Education Building. The students are required to take seminar three semesters. In one semester, the student presents his or her thesis proposal. In the other semesters, the student presents a seminar on a topic of his or her choosing which has been researched in the primary literature. As part of the seminar series, all presentations are videotaped for later review.

Attending faculty fill out a seminar evaluation sheet (Rubric 2 from the Department of Biology Assessment plan). Students are provided also provided written feedback concerning their seminar. Thus far, 8 student presentations have been evaluated. As shown above, student presentation quality has been judged by one to four faculty members. Although variability of assessment is high, students who have presented a seminar in the previous semester have shown improvement.

One reason for relatively low scores is the rubric which assigns 35/ 100 points to results and discussion. Of course students presenting their thesis proposal do not have these sections fully developed. One solution is to develop a different rubric for thesis proposals than is used for regular seminars.

Thesis

The Department has also implemented the tool to assess the student thesis quality and to select the Department's nomination for "Best Thesis Award."

Members of the graduate committee reviewed the theses from the three graduate students who completed their degrees in 2003. The theses were reviewed for five traits which represent specific learning objectives. The committee members found all theses to be acceptable (none received more than one score of "Below Average"). The top thesis selected was submitted for evaluation by the campus committee where it was judged to be the best from the College of Natural and Social Sciences.

Future Goals:

There are two objectives remaining to be formally met on the original assessment plan. The first is to have graduate faculty evaluate the teaching and student learning outcomes of individual graduate level classes. So far, this task has been conducted informally by having multiple instructors co-teach a course. For example, in Summer 2003, Drs. Albrecht, Skinner, and Hoback taught Biology 821-80, Conservation Biology to approximately 40 graduate students. Each professor participated in evaluation of written assignments, discussion board, and take-home exams. Additional courses including Introduction to Graduate Studies and Organic Evolution have featured interactive guest lectures by graduate faculty. In 2003-2004 we hope to formalize mechanisms to peer-review graduate course offerings and better assess student training by applying Rubric 1 to a subset of graduate students enrolled in each class.

Secondly, all graduating masters students conduct an exit interview with the Department Chair. This interview has been rather informal and in 2003-2004 we intend to develop a set of questions to be asked of all students in their exit interview. The answers to these questions will be scored using the scale presented in Table 2 of our assessment document.