Assessment of LAHS
May 8, 2004
This is the 2004 report on assessment of the major in Liberal Arts
for the Human Services (LAHS). It is keyed to the goals set for the major
set out for the Committee on Assessment of Student Learning in 2000 and posted
on the web site http://www.mrs.umn.edu/committees/asl/unit2000/LAHS.html.
1. All students graduating with a major in LAHS have
demonstrated their mastery of knowledge in a wide variety of subfields of
psychology and of sociology and/or anthropology, and typically also in
additional areas related to the provision of human services. This is
assured by the distribution requirements of the LAHS major and assessed by
examinations whose questions draw on or are patterned after nationally used
question banks, as well as papers that demonstrate the relevant kinds of
mastery in introductory psychology, sociology, and anthropology.
2a. All students graduating with a major in LAHS have demonstrated
a degree of mastery of statistics at the level of introductory statistics.
2b. All students graduating with a major in LAHS have
successfully applied the conceptual terms of the social sciences to one or more
psychosocial problems as evidenced by their successful completion of an
undergraduate internship of 4 or more semester credits in a
human-services-related setting. These internships are scrutinized for
appropriateness by faculty and approved by the Academic Dean, and they require
that students complete them with attestation of satisfactory performance
by their field supervisor and approval of a journal and integrative final paper
by the faculty supervisor. All LAHS majors must complete this process to
graduate.
3. In surveys of students majoring in LAHS and
graduating during1975-1998, 73% said their job was in the same field or in one
related to their major. This suggests that in the great majority of
instances the major is performing its job of preparing graduates for
human-services occupations.
4. The LAHS major requires students to demonstrate their
knowledge of how ethical principles and legal constraints will impact their
functioning in a postbaccalaureate human-services-related professional
position.
Examination of our objectives and discussion of faculty
experiences has led to the following decisions:
1. To investigate the extent to which LAHS majors pursue
programs that are coherent with respect to students' postbaccalaureate
objectives.
2. To standardize the instructions for final internship
papers to require that they apply concepts of the social sciences to specific
psychosocial problems. Although these papers presumably already perform
this function, LAHS faculty wished to prevent unforeseen exceptions as a result
of varied instructions provided by different LAHS faculty.
Eric Klinger
Professor of Psychology
Division of Social Sciences
University of Minnesota, Morris
600 East Fourth Street
Morris, MN 56267 USA
(320) 589-6209 (Morris office), -1023 (home), -6117 (fax)
www.mrs.umn.edu/academic/psychology/klinger.shtml