General Education Assessment Fellow
The School of Communication Studies
Email: hickerca@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-7377

Project Summary
When businesses are asked about the top competencies they expect from students coming out of colleges and universities, “effective oral communications skills” is frequently high on their list.  Recognizing the need to incorporate proven assessment practices into the oral communications component of JMU’s General Education curriculum, Dr. Corey Hickerson set off to devise an appropriate performance assessment that communications faculty could use to evaluate the students in their classrooms.  Hickerson’s fellowship focused on identifying discrete objectives for the oral communications assessment which he then translated into a highly-usable rubric and accompanying testing scheme that offers great promise in ensuring that JMU students have the much sought-after communications skills that are deemed so critical in today’s workplace.

Department of Health Sciences
Email: lewiskl@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-2607

Project Summary
Across the Commonwealth and throughout the nation, policymakers and constituents are calling for greater efficiency and accountability in the health care industry, and Dr. Kristi Lewis is doing her part to ensure that JMU graduates are meeting the high standards necessary for them to become valuable contributors to our nation’s health care system.  Lewis spent her time as an assessment fellow identifying the critical competencies necessary for health sciences students who participate in the core curriculum offered by JMU’s department of health sciences.  Concentrating on a mixture of nationally-recognized tests and locally-developed items, Lewis constructed an instrument that aligns with the identified competencies and that will assist the health sciences program in continuing to improve it role in training highly-competent professionals.

Psychological Sciences Program, Department of Graduate Psychology
Department of Undergraduate Psychology
Email: serdiksl@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-7089

Project Summary
JMU consistently graduates over 200 psychology majors each year, making the undergraduate psychology program the largest single major on JMU’s campus.  Dr. Sherry Serdikoff is no stranger to strong assessment programs, and spent her fellowship creating innovative evaluations aimed at myriad competencies tantamount to a solid education in psychology.  Additionally, Serdikoff has an appointment as the program director for the Psychological Sciences Master of Arts program.  The Psychological Sciences Program at James Madison University fosters the development of students interested in becoming research scientists by providing rigorous training to produce graduates who are well versed in substantive content areas in psychological science and who are highly trained to independently conduct, critique, and report psychological research.  Serdikoff created a number of cutting-edge assessment methods that have since been incorporated into the core curriculum of this highly-successful master’s program.

Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Email: casiplar@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-6747

Project Summary
One of the newest programs at JMU is the major in statistics.  Designed to meet the public and private needs for skilled statisticians, JMU’s statistics program is unique in that students may choose between an applied and a mathematical track to accomplish the degree requirements.  Arlene Casiple, an instructor in the department, recognized the need for innovative assessment techniques with which faculty could track students’ accomplishments of goals and objectives during their academic career.  Casiple used her assessment fellowship to develop the framework for a student assessment that relies on portfolios—a relatively new technique for assessing students that is among the most promising according to contemporary educational researchers.  A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress, and achievements in one or more areas of the curriculum. Thanks to Casiple’s skilled work in developing the portfolio process, JMU statistics graduates will have a unique and versatile record of their learning.

College of Business
Email: mitrimx@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-3019

Project Summary
JMU’s College of Business has always embraced assessment as an avenue to student success, so when Dr. Michael Mitri, a professor of Computer Information Systems (CIS) in the college, started his assessment fellowship in the summer of 2005, he aimed to take his college’s assessment program to the next level.  Armed with a thorough understanding of how technology can accelerate his assessment initiatives, Mitri accomplished two projects during his tenure as an assessment fellow.  First, Mitri formalized the assessment program for JMU’s CIS major.  This assessment process took advantage of numerous techniques with which Mitri could make beneficial inferences about the learning and development of the students in his program.  Students were asked to demonstrate computer programming skills, respond to structured questions during focus groups, and participate in a spiral-designed assessment in which all four primary courses that compose the major were evaluated in a single day.  Mitri’s second project similarly capitalized on his technology skills, in that he devised an inventive software component that both generated and evaluated scoring templates for the various performance assessment inherent to the College of Business.  Using this system Mitri expects that college faculty will save a great deal of time, which they can now devote to working with students or further improving the assessment processes in the college.

Undergraduate Minor in Human Resource Development
Graduate Degree in Adult Human Resource Development
College of Education
Email: wilcoxdm@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-6707

Project Summary
Organizations thrive when members have specialized skills in training, analysis and leadership, and JMU’s human resource development programs exist to meet this critical need.  The programs are designed to provide students with a wide variety of content disciplines with the competencies necessary to achieve enhanced career ladder opportunities; interpret and apply research; and develop conceptual, interpersonal, and technical leadership skills, all while working with diverse populations.  The work completed by Wilcox during her assessment fellowship allows the two programs to effectively assess the variety of competencies—including difficult-to-assess behavioral objectives—expected of graduates of the programs.

General Education Program
Email: facknisx@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-7022

Project Summary
JMU takes the importance of writing across the general education curriculum very seriously.  With the help of Dr. Susan Facknitz, the assessment of students’ writing is stronger than ever in the literature tier of General Education Cluster Two: Arts and Humanities.  Facknitz embarked upon a novel project in her assessment fellowship, in that she took a unique integrated approach to the evaluation of writing through the use of technology to accelerate and improve the assessment process.  This integrated approach seeks to assess writing in General Education Cluster Two, Tier Three courses in a context that provides feedback to both students and faculty members through a Web-based instructional system to help remedy identified deficiencies in student writing. It seeks to address the problem of motivation by conducting the assessments in a context that is paired with the course as they are taking it and by offering feedback and support for student learning of a skill that is central to their grade in the course.  Facknitz’s fellowship is a rewarding example of how innovation can accomplish numerous goals even given a challenging assessment task.

College of Integrated Science and Technology
Email: handlemk@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-2528

Project Summary
Dr. Mary Handley is a faculty member who wears many hats.  Not only does Handley teach in the College of Integrated Science and Technology (ISAT), but she also manages the assessment programs for the college’s ISAT, Interdisciplinary Liberal Studies (IDLS), and geography majors.  All three program have different objectives, different curriculums, and different instructional models, yet Handley used her time as an Assessment Fellow to produce three separate—but equally strong—assessment programs for the three majors.  Of note, Handley continually maintained focus on creating a set of assessments that would allow the program faculty members to “close the loop”, or utilize the data for positive program improvement.

Department of English
Email: fultonpm@jmu.edu
Phone: 540-568-

Project Summary
Peter Fulton, an Assistant Professor in Department of English specializing in the field of American Studies, was given the task building a "new and improved" assessment program for his department.  The inherently transdisciplinary nature of the study of English, not to mention the extraordinary breadth of this major, calls for new models and procedures for determining relevant measurable outcomes which accurately reflect the work of this department as a whole.  This has also been a prime opportunity to explore ways of customizing the rich database-oriented resources made available by the office of Information Technology --particularly into those regions that on first glance might appear impenetrable to computational analysis.  In the case of the English Department, the value added of having embraced the measurement and assessment "ethic" has included enhanced advising procedures and improved methods of departmental governance, as well.