UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The French and Francophone Studies doctoral program has recently implemented a revised strategy for assessing student learning by aligning a custom-designed rubric with most of its program learning objectives (PLOs). PLOs state what students should know and be able to do by the end of the program. By applying this rubric during dissertation defenses, the program regularly collects evidence of student learning at the program level.
Doctoral committee members score each student’s dissertation defense using the rubric, which includes clearly defined performance criteria directly mapped to five of the program’s PLOs. This streamlined process allows the program to use a single milestone to identify areas where the program demonstrates strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Collaboration and reflection as catalysts for change
The French and Francophone Studies doctoral program’s current assessment approach evolved, in part, through feedback from Penn State’s Office of Planning, Assessment, and Institutional Research (OPAIR) and through the program learning assessment process.
At Penn State, all undergraduate, graduate, and for-credit certificate programs are required to assess how well their students are achieving key PLOs. Each year, programs identify at least one PLO to assess. They collect and analyze data to determine how well students are meeting that objective and then use those findings to inform any changes — whether in pedagogy, curriculum, instruction, student support, or assessment methods. This helps ensure that students are gaining the knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to succeed both in and beyond the classroom.
“The exchanges with OPAIR were absolutely key for thinking through both the short-term goals and benefits of the program assessment and the mid-term and long-term ones,” said associate professor Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François, who served as the program’s Director of Graduate Studies during the development of the rubric.
According to Jean-François, the program originally created a rubric several years ago to more efficiently assess multiple PLOs. In response to suggestions from OPAIR, the faculty later revised the rubric to include short descriptions for each performance level. These changes improved scoring consistency among faculty reviewers and revealed areas where some rubric criteria were not fully aligned with the program’s learning objectives.
“While it may look minor, this modification helped us adjust and refine our rubric in ways we hadn’t even considered initially,” Jean-François said.
A model for doctoral program assessment
Alongside the rubric revision, the program adopted a multi-year approach to collecting assessment data. Due to the program’s small cohort size — a characteristic common among doctoral programs — collecting data on multiple PLOs over several years helps establish a more robust dataset.
While data from other milestones, such as qualifying and comprehensive exams, are also collected, the dissertation defense has become the cornerstone of program-level assessment.
“Because the dissertation represents the culmination of our program, we agree that it also constitutes the most relevant, meaningful, and reliable output for assessing our PLOs — especially in a multi-year data collection process,” Jean-François said.
This approach illustrates how even doctoral programs with relatively few annual graduates can effectively document learning across multiple program-level objectives.
About Program Learning Assessment at Penn State
The assessment success stories featured in this series highlight how Penn State programs are using assessment findings to improve student learning. These stories typically involve a full cycle of assessment: identifying an area for change, implementing an action plan, and reassessing a program learning objective to see whether there’s evidence that the change or changes made a difference. This process plays a central role in Penn State’s commitment to continuous academic improvement and is commonly referred to as “closing the loop.”
Visit this link for more information about the program learning assessment process, or email assessment@psu.edu with any questions.