Outcomes Assessment—Department of Philosophy Capstone Seminar

Dr. Catherine A. Womack, Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Bridgewater State College

The Philosophy Department’s initial plan for outcomes assessment was to assign a three-part reflective essay, asking the students to evaluate their own philosophical progress in three areas: 1) Philosophy and Its History; 2) Philosophical Problems; and 3) Application of Philosophy to Other Disciplines. They were to provide evidence for their evaluations in the form of discussion of papers they wrote or exams they took (or even class discussions, group assignments, etc.) that demonstrated particular instances of progress in these areas.

We implemented this essay assignment in my Philosophy of Mind and Language Seminar in the spring of 2002, and quickly found the limitations of assigning an extra essay within a standing course. Some of the problems were:

time—this assignment detracted from the work to be spent on the content of the Phil. of Mind course

grading—we did not think the essay should be graded in the same way as standard philosophy papers

motivation—if students were not to be graded on the assignment, they would not be sufficiently motivated to do good work on it

time again—in order to get the level of performance from the students, faculty need to spend a lot of time helping prepare students for writing, clarifying what expectations are, reading and revising, and giving lots of quick-turnaround feedback on the essays.

Our solution was to implement a senior capstone seminar, devoted to two goals: 1) providing philosophical content (readings, discussions) on the three categories listed above; 2) working through the multiple steps of producing the three-part reflective essay.

I taught this course with 4 students—all senior philosophy majors—in the spring of 2004. We read and had lively discussion of works in the three areas and worked on the essays.

Producing these essays turned out to be much more demanding that any of us anticipated. None of the students—all good scholars in previous courses—had any idea of how to proceed with a self-evaluation using evidence from papers. The steps I laid out were roughly as follows:

for each of the three essays:

• list philosophy courses taken (also any related courses)
• discuss favorite or interesting topics from those courses
• list/discuss papers written on these courses
• pick 5 topics to write about
• what to say about the topics: what philosophical lesson was learned, what you said in the paper you cited, how it connects to the philosophical lesson
• turn in draft
• read/discuss comments
• revise and turn in copy
• possible second revision for third and final copy

I was surprised that, with the first drafts of the first essay, not one of the students seemed to understand the sort of task we had in mind. We discussed what they did do and what I wanted them to do. I spent a lot of time with them discussing my own philosophical development as an undergraduate and in fact did the assignments alongside them at first. By the second draft, everyone was clear about what they were to do. From then on, the process went relatively smoothly. I might add that I had 30-60 minute individual meetings with students at least twice during the term for discussing the written drafts.

This course was one of the two best I have taught in my 10-year academic career. What made it so wonderful? Well, because of the intense concentration on the work and progress of the students, I was able to get to know them extremely well philosophically; I could see what sorts of philosophical tastes and styles they had acquired, and I could also see how they acquired them. I could not have gotten this just from class discussion—I needed to read lots of their work. Doing this gave me insight into how to advise them for future philosophical work (some of them are interested in graduate study in the future). The students were very enthusiastic and responsive to the readings, and in fact did extra work so we could finish one of the books (of which I had assigned a few chapters). We even met during exam period to finish discussing this book (Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves).

I was also able to see, through them, some of the strengths and weaknesses of our program. We have just hired a historian of philosophy to help boost our history of philosophy offerings. From the seminar, it became clear how important this is; in order to provide our students with a top quality philosophy degree, they need a stronger background in historical works.

Philosophy Departments typically have a small, if active, coterie of majors. This course will virtually never have more than 10 students, and most likely will have an enrollment of about 5 students. We as a department are very pleased that BSC is so interested in the quality of the major programs as to direct departments to devise outcomes assessment tools. We also stress how important it is to support courses that serve such a vital educational purpose.

For more information, see course syllabus (Word document).

Last Modified: June 5, 2008