Common types of culminating experiences

A project-based experience requires students to complete a serious intellectual project, incorporating the discipline’s primary mode(s) of inquiry into a final product that is consistent with practices in the discipline.  Such projects allow students to demonstrate that they have met the learning outcomes in the major.

Students can be given a specific project or assignment that will allow programs to evaluate how well they have prepared the students to meet the expectations of the program. (For example, students in an English major might be asked to prepare a literary analysis of a work of their choice suitable for presentation at a conference that accepts student presentations.) The work can then be evaluated based on an analytic rubric. When the results of the assessment are compiled, if thirty percent of the resulting reports were found to have scored as weak in integrating secondary sources in the critique, then this could be identified as a part of the curriculum that would need to be strengthened. For projects or assignments to provide useful information about the learning in the program, they cannot be specific just to that course but must draw upon the degree program’s culminating learning outcomes.

If the final product is a group-based project, you may not necessarily be able to assess students on their individual ability to achieve the learning outcomes.  Consider what aspects of the project are best done as group work (not as important to assess students’ individual degree program learning), and what aspects need to be conducted individually.

Students enroll in a class that focuses on an issue in the field (different content or issues are covered for each section of the class offered). The course is designed to ask students to demonstrate the learning goals for the major and is designed to challenge students to demonstrate their mastery in the major.  In this version, all students complete a similar product, such as a research paper with a presentation and a reflective journal.  The issue under study (or content area) changes, but some or all of the assignments remain the same across sections of the course.  The faculty’s role is to teach the course to the specific content area they have selected, ensure their assignments and grading scales are the same across instructors, and evaluate students’ work using the same standards (to ensure reliability across faculty members’ grading).

Students from two or more disciplines (or specializations) engage in interdisciplinary inquiry. For example, Geography majors and Biology majors enroll in their major’s capstone courses and are paired with a student from the other discipline.  Each Geography-Biology pair of students completes an interdisciplinary project such as a project that uses geographic information systems (GIS) to monitor fish migration patterns or habitat changes.

Independent development of research, scholarship, performance, or creative work can be a great experience for students to showcase their disciplinary or inter-disciplinary experiences in the major.  These experiences are most frequently for students preparing for graduate level work or professional work in the field.

When using simulations, students are provided with situations or problems which model the kinds of work expected of them.  For example, students might be organized into teams for a semester-long exercise in managing their own companies using a computer-based simulation called the Business Strategy Game.  Halfway through the semester, student companies are asked to reflect on their past successes or failures, accomplish a comprehensive analysis of the industry and the competition, and develop a Three-Year Strategic Plan for employment the last half of the semester. In the plan, students are required to demonstrate competencies in all functional areas of business as well as pay attention to the legal, ethical, and justice issues in dealing with a variety of business decisions. Student teams deliver oral presentations of their plans to their “Board of Directors,” consisting of Division of Business faculty, supplemented by the Division’s Business Advisory Board.

A Political Science capstone project at the University of North Dakota is formed around a simulated academic conference where students present papers to one another. In the first class session, students are introduced to the concept and format of an academic conference. Students resurrect a paper they have written for a political science course during their undergraduate career and prepare it for later presentation. Student panels around general topics are organized by the instructor, who serves as chair and discussant for each panel. Often the instructor will raise questions regarding themes that transcend individual courses, such as power, citizenship, and institutional structure and design. The presentations are assessed by the instructor using an oral communication rubric, and the papers on which the presentations are based are assessed by both the instructor and other students using critical thinking and written communication rubrics.

Students enrolled in a Political Science capstone course are required to be part of “teaching teams” that deliver a presentation to small breakout groups of students enrolled in a 100-level introduction to American government course. A pair of capstone students delivers a 30-minute presentation and facilitates group discussion on the nature of political science as a discipline, the ways in which basic concepts introduced in the American government course are reinforced through the rest of the major’s curriculum, and the soon-to-be graduates’ impressions of the major, the field, and professional opportunities. The instructor circulates among the groups to observe the teams’ presentation style and interaction with the American government students. The American government students assess the capstone students’ presentations using the oral communication rubric.

Students write a grant proposal and present an oral summary of the proposal. Students work in teams to develop a National Institute of Health-style grant proposal on a topic of current interest.  The teams then prepare an oral presentation of their proposed grant project. Both the final proposal and presentation are broken down into stages that students complete throughout the semester. Students receive formative feedback at each stage as well as summative feedback on the final products from faculty who use detailed rubrics to evaluate the student work. All assessment criteria are shared with students prior to the submission of their work products.

Students may be asked to maintain a portfolio of their work over the course of their curriculum and then prepare and present their portfolio as part of a capstone course. This might be combined with some final projects as part of the portfolio. Such portfolios may be presented by students or simply collected and evaluated. Again, the portfolios need to be organized and evaluated according to a pre-established rubric which identifies the key areas to assess and the criteria for evaluation that measures the key outcomes expected of graduates. (Why use rubrics instead of grades?  Rubrics provide much more precise information about what aspect of the skill or assignment students excelled at or were challenged by.  More precise information about student learning can be used to enhance the curriculum.  More general information does not assist faculty in re-designing and improving the curriculum.)  They may be evaluated by faculty or by people in the field or a combination. The key is to look for patterns. If even 20% of the portfolios for the Technical Communication program were found to have weak proofreading skills (not in fact the case), this would be a serious matter that would need to be addressed in the curriculum. There are many different ways to collect and evaluate portfolios. Students may be asked to select their best work, have work representative of different areas of expectations or representing different courses, or have work representing their development. The portfolio could be assessed as a whole or earlier work can be assessed against later work to measure development.

Majors enroll in a course that serves as a site for portfolio collection and reflection. In this capstone, students are required to place specific documents from their previous work in the major into a portfolio that illustrates their achievement of the major’s learning outcomes. In this manner, students clearly develop meaning between their assignments and the major’s learning outcomes.  Sometimes students revise some of that work for the portfolio. Sometimes they have to add a final piece – a research paper, for example. Students are usually asked to include a reflective essay in the portfolio, explaining what the portfolio shows about their experience as undergraduates in the department.

Majors in a Communication department select courses in their major areas but are required to also complete a departmental core focused on the essential elements of research, writing, law, and practical application, and emphasis areas (electronic media, journalism, human communication, public relations, corporate communication, and sports information). Students enrolled in the capstone experience create a portfolio that includes core submissions (cover letter, resume, and samples of expository or critical writing) and representative pieces reflecting accomplishments in their emphasis area (e.g., manuscripts, production tapes, news clippings, designs). Each submission is accompanied by a written reflection. A three-member faculty jury assesses the portfolios using collaboratively developed criteria and rubrics.

At University of Colorado-Boulder, Women Studies majors are asked to collect a portfolio of all materials from their Women Studies courses and to write a short summary for each course. Specific questions about learning styles and experiences are provided to guide their reflections. They write a full paper about their experience as a Women Studies major, tracing the main themes and content of their learning experience. In addition, each student is asked to design and carry out a research project on a topic that extends their learning experience. Three faculty members independently rate the reflective and research papers, using guidelines and specific questions about how the students’ performance reflects each of the program’s knowledge or skill goals.

In this type of capstone, students sign up for internships or other kinds of experiential learning. They can be required to produce something for a co-requisite course, or, if the department feels confident that the level of demand imposed by the internship is consistent with its goals, the student can be required simply to complete the internship. The role of the faculty is to help students make connections between learning in the major and learning on the ground and to make sure that evaluation includes departmental learning goals. Internship/research/service supervisors are active parts of the assessment of the student’s performance.

The challenge in assessing internships, clinical experiences and service learning experiences is to ensure the goals and objectives of the internship or practical experience are aligned with the learning outcomes of the degree program.  A second challenge is ensuring whoever is conducting the assessment (frequently an individual outside of the institution) is using the same standards desired by faculty in the degree program.  A structured rubric can provide analytic information about our students’ performance provided either by the professional in the field or a supervising faculty member. By identifying patterns of performances across a number of students, programs can gain solid data on where students are best prepared and where they would benefit from additional learning experiences.

Students doing internships in this program complete a weekly diary/journal that logs their experiences and insights gained from the experience. Students also send regular emails to their on-campus internship supervisors. At the conclusion of the internship, they prepare a paper that includes an overview of the accounting field, an overview of the company where the internship was completed, a reaction to the internship, and an evaluation of it based on its relationship to previously completed coursework. This paper is accompanied by an oral presentation. All these materials are assessed by the on-campus internship supervisor. A student’s performance during the internship is evaluated by the on-site supervisor as well.  Both students and on-site supervisors are given opportunities to assess the internship program and their experiences associated with it. This feedback helps those responsible for the program to adjust course content, assignments, and activities so that the degree program curriculum and the internship are coordinated and integrated learning experiences.

To be eligible for the capstone course, students must have completed an internship or have their internship waived due to substantial professional experience. The capstone builds on students’ experiences in internships or work sites. All students must produce a professional-quality analytical paper that addresses a managerial or policy issue confronting the public or nonprofit organization where they work or interned. Each student has a three-person committee, composed of two faculty members and the student’s work or internship supervisor who oversee the project. Students present their final capstone papers to an audience of other students, faculty, and practitioners in the field of study. After the presentation, committee members ask questions, followed by questions from others in attendance.

An academic unit may combine types of experiences across multiple courses and requirements for their capstone. If it makes sense to combine experiences across multiple courses and requirements, all courses are not required to have a “C” designation.  Instead, it is necessary to (1) be sure that the course or courses designated with a “C” for capstone collectively requires at least 3 units of credit, and (2) the syllabi for the connected courses describe how the course connections serve the discipline and future experiences of students, so students understand and make connections across the courses.  Whenever possible, developing assignments that integrate learning across the co-requisites to reinforce the learning connections and relationships of course material among the required courses.

• In the natural sciences, some programs engage students in both a lab or field capstone and a research capstone, developing them as co-requisites and creating important connections across the experiences in the lab or field and the research course.  In the research capstone, students propose a topic, conduct a literature review, collect and analyze data, summarize results, develop conclusions and recommendations, and present findings to decision-makers in the form of a thesis or multimedia presentation.  The lab or field course focuses can either be the course where students test their hypotheses, or gather data relevant to their research paper, or the lab or field course can provide culminating experiences in that area of the degree program.
• Students complete two capstone experiences: a professional development capstone and a synthesizing co-requisite capstone. In the professional development capstone, students participate in a student teaching internship that is assessed by the supervising teacher.  In the co-requisite capstone, students engage in guided discussions of issues faced in their student teaching experience, and discuss and troubleshoot challenges with each other.  The graded portion of the co-requisite is the finalized portfolio of teaching materials submitted by the student at the end of their semester.

Consider incorporating a reflective element. Assignments that assist student to look within themselves to explore the purpose of their undergraduate education and examine their academic and non-academic work in the context of their own values and lives provides the space for students to make connections between their disciplinary and inter-disciplinary experiences, their curricular and co-curricular activities, and their future goals.  Ask students questions such as, “What is the purpose of our work here?” “How is it important to you, or to the world around you?”

Although reflective assignments are not required in the capstone, they have been shown to provide a strong framework for making course-to-course and experience-to-experience connections across the students’ undergraduate experience.

Reflections can assist program faculty in improving the curriculum to better serve and support students.  By reading about how students have grown personally, academically, and professionally through their academic experiences, we, as faculty, obtain better insights into how to structure the curriculum in a manner to support students’ development.  For example, students might provide reflective papers concerning how their experiences in the major are connected to the program’s learning outcomes.  By writing short reflective pieces that describe what they have learned, students are able to identify how their assignments and experiences have helped them achieve each program outcomes.

In the past, tests and final exams have not been perceived by the Liberal Studies Committees as assignments that provide culminating experiences for students and prepare them for their future beyond the university. Yet, if constructed carefully, they can be effective assessment measures.  If your capstone is incorporating exams to effectively measure content knowledge of students, develop a capstone experience with a foundation project of skill-based learning, such as writing assignments, oral presentations, and discipline-specific inquiry and analysis, then incorporate the exam(s) as assignments to collect additional assessment evidence of students’ content knowledge.

If the goals of capstone assessment are to evaluate student learning for the program and not just that course, the exam(s) cannot simply be on the material covered in the capstone. It needs to be tied to the degree program’s student learning outcomes with questions that are relevant and specific to student achievement of the outcomes. The analysis of the test results should look at both the performance of individual students as well as the general success of students on the key exam questions.

can also be useful measures of the success of a program. However, the overall scores on such instruments are not sufficient information, since they cannot be used to refine and enhance targeted learning outcomes of the degree program.  If possible, it is useful to have an analysis of student performance on different areas of the test, as this information might be aligned enough to the program’s learning outcomes to be informative for continual improvement efforts.  If such certification exams do not provide in-depth analytic information, developing in-house instruments, or incorporating another culminating experience into the course would be necessary to gain a better picture of the strengths and weaknesses of student learning.