2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are an integral part of a degree assessment and evaluation plan. These are concise statements that indicate the skills, knowledge, and abilities that students in an undergraduate degree program are expected to demonstrate. One SLO for the horticulture major at Michigan State University is for students to use multiple sources, including both primary and secondary literature, to find, evaluate, organize, and manage information related to horticultural systems. Though students gain an understanding of concepts by reading literature and writing summaries in many courses, they may not be readily able to interpret data, apply concepts, and make recommendations from the literature to practical horticultural situations. These skills are especially important for students to improve their critical thinking, interpret written information, and have confidence in their recommendations. Therefore, we implemented a literature review project in a greenhouse production course involving reading a series of primary greenhouse production journal articles from HortScience related to course content, writing summary papers, and discussing the articles. The objectives were to increase students’ confidence in and ability to critically analyze primary literature, formulate practical recommendations from the literature, and communicate those recommendations to industry professionals. To assess the effectiveness of our primary literature review project, we administered a series of ten pre- and post-reading surveys to track student content knowledge and student confidence over the semester. We also analyzed the article summaries based on a rubric emphasizing the importance of providing accurate, complete, and practical recommendations to a greenhouse industry professional.