Implementing Assessment and Improving Undergraduate Writing: One Department's Experience

WHAT HAVE OUR STUDENTS LEARNED? What do they know? A program assessment which seeks to answer this question is freighted with importance, because it may entail a shift in departmental focus, energy and resources. Frequently questions of assessment play a significant role as part of university-wide accreditation or the accreditation of programs for the certification of teachers. (The National Council for the Accrediting of Teacher Education and the National Council for the Social Studies both have assessment at the core of their new accreditation procedures.) History departments, however, are not generally known as hotbeds of assessment activity. Doctoral programs in history rarely touch the issue of how to assess student learning, while program review as an idea appears to many historians as an invasion of their turf by outsiders. At Eastern Michigan University, members of the faculty in the Department of History and Philosophy have worked to turn the process of assessment into a tool for improving the critical thinking, research, and writing abilities of students in our history program. For the past three years, the department has completed an annual review of papers produced in its research and writing methods class, History 300. As a result of this ongoing process of assessment, faculty who have taught this class have made a number of changes to their assignments in order to insure