French, Classics, and Italian

Learning Outcomes/Goals:

French and Italian:

1)  Students should have a level of speaking competency that allows them to function in community of native speakers.

2)  Students should know and be able to negotiate the cultural landscape of the communities/countries in which the target languages are spoken.

3)  Students should be able to read and understand a variety of texts with fluency and be able to express themselves in writing using the target language.

Assessment Methods:

French, Italian, Greek and Latin

  1. Placement tests: regularly administered to student entering program
  2. Capstone courses: These are comprehensive in that they address communicative, cultural, and literary fluency. The Classics faculty have made a research paper capstone part of fourth year senior seminars and have introduced introductory methods courses at the lower level (e.g. CLA 190, “Introduction to Classics”) to ensure that students who finish the program come away with ability to apply research methods in the context of competency in the target languages and cultures
  3. Yearly exam: in the spring semester to assess mastery of grammar, morphology, and general fluency of reading skills at the end of the first, second, and third and fourth year of study. These exams are also used to determine honors awards at each level (Classics only)

Assessment Results:

French and Italian

  1. There has been no noticeable change in the placement of students in FRN or ITL. However, the FRN coordinator and FRN faculty are evaluating the placement test to ensure that it provides an accurate instrument for placement of students and a for establishing a baseline for latter assessment.
  2. Faculty teaching the capstone courses in FRN have discovered that students were sometimes lacking a sense of the field and were deficient in knowledge of methods employed by the profession. On rarer occasions, students exhibited deficiency in the target language.
  3. The FRN faculty have selected a new 100 level text and are evaluating new textbooks for the 200 level this year

Classics (Greek and Latin)

  1. The exams have shown a consistency in performance within the range of the numbers of students in each level.
  2. The Classics effectiveness of the CLA capstone will not be evident until after the 2006-2007 academic year, since it is part of the new program.

Action Taken:

  1. The Department instituted a diagnostic exam, taken at the end of second year French, to assess student’s proficiency in the language during the transition to third year courses.

Results from Actions Taken:

  1. The exam, which was administered in the Spring of 2005, has shown that students are not mastering written forms nor competent in all expected tense formations that would be expected in third, and especially in fourth year courses. It was also observed that the exam itself was sometimes unclear and so will be revised in its next iteration.

Future Plans:

  1. Assessment portfolios. These are in the planning stages and could include the following:
  1. Samples of student work collected over a given time frame
  2. Student self-assessment (e.g. at the beginning of third year sequence and then at the end of the sequence)
  3. Teacher assessments (short narratives by instructors addressing students’ level at the beginning and end of a sequence)