University of South Carolina Columbia
Act 629 - Summary Reports on Institutional Effectiveness
Fiscal Year 2001 - 2002

Psychology, BA, BS, MA, PhD

Assessment methods/instruments used include: exit interview, alumni survey, employer survey, course evaluation/grade assignment, GRE scores/admittance to graduate school, research fair and review of papers. In Fall 2000, less than 85% of undergraduate students completing course evaluations for methods courses agreed or strongly agreed that they learned a lot in the methods course. Open-ended comments suggest that students find the course material challenging, but do not feel that they have mastered the methods or developed competence in applying them. Student exit surveys show students somewhat less confident in their ability to understand and use scientific research. This has resulted in changes in the required laboratory course to teach how to conduct a web-based survey and subsequent analysis of the data. In addition, recitation sections have been added to the statistics course to increase opportunity to apply statistics to problems.