Assessment will measure the extent to which the goals and objectives of the undergraduate program are successfully met by courses and internships offered to majors. The surveys will consist of an identical battery of questions that permits respondents to evaluate our major, describe their own political activity, and identify the skills they most associate with training in our major. The post-internship interview will include a similar, but shorter, survey. Combined with the conventional teaching evaluations administered by the Department, the surveys should immediately inform us of the areas in which we are particularly effective or weak, but should also offer an even more valuable opportunity to learn something about how the objectives and perceptions of our students change over time. The survey described above lets us directly assess the satisfaction and experience of alumni.
Mentors routinely evaluate the work of interns at the end of the semester.
Teaching internship coordinators. A number of students in our major are in the Education curriculum and participate in a student teaching internship. Successful completion of the internship and evaluation of the performance of the majors could be used as an indicator to measure the success of our program in training future teachers. Our success rate in placing students in graduate programs should be an indicator of success of our program in training students for graduate study. We do not anticipate using a formal curriculum review as a component of the assessment of our undergraduate program.