2017 ASHS Annual Conference

Like many Land-Grant institutions in the U.S., over the last decade, Washington State University (WSU) has consolidated several of its’ former agricultural department-based, undergraduate degree programs and restructured them into multi-departmental, interdisciplinary programs. One such program is called Integrated Plant Sciences (IPS, ips.wsu.edu). The IPS program comprises six different majors: Agricultural Biotechnology, Field Crop Management, Fruit and Vegetable Management, Landscape, Nursery and Greenhouse Management, Turfgrass Management and Viticulture and Enology. This successful program currently has more than 250 undergraduate students enrolled. To assess the quality of student work in the IPS program, a rubric with seven student-learning outcomes (SLOs) was used. We focused on two of these SLOs in this study. They were scientific reasoning and the use of scholarly information (e.g., obtaining, evaluating, and applying). We used this program-wide rubric to compare the quality student work in both an introductory (HORT/CROP_SCI 202 “Plant Growth and Development”) and senior-level course (SOIL_SCI 441 “Soil Fertility”). In particular, we focused on final projects submitted by student teams. In the former course, this was a final research poster summarizing a semester-long, greenhouse-based plant growth and development research project. In the latter course, this was a final nutrient management plan created for a “real-world” plant-soil system of interest (e.g., commercial orchard, vineyard, etc.). Course instructors provided samples of representative student work (e.g., “A”, “B”, and “C” grade-level) but did not disclose student grades. For each of the two courses, members of the IPS assessment committee received copies of representative student final projects, the student assignment prompts and the program-wide assessment rubric. Assessment committee members used the rubric to independently evaluate and rank the student projects on scale of 1 point (minimal) to 6 points (mastery). Following their independent evaluation, the assessment committee came together and participated in a facilitated discussion with a university teaching and assessment specialist. The purpose of this discussion was to compare and norm our project ratings and to determine a critical threshold score that was expected for student proficiency. Student team proficiency for these SLOs at both the freshman and senior level and the benefits and limitations of using a program-wide assessment rubric will be presented and discussed.