Math Dept. 2008 Assessment Report

Assessment Report for the

Mathematics Department

September, 2008

Introduction

As part of our assessment program, the Mathematics Department continued its ongoing efforts to improve the curriculum through assessment activities. Activities for the past few years have focused on content assessment and revising the Mathematics Major.

Assessment Activities

The Mathematics Department composed detailed course summaries for each mathematics course. These summaries, which include topics covered, possible texts, sample syllabi, and assessment questions can be found at this link. Over the past three years, the department analyzed the content of each course and its purpose in the curriculum. After carefully considering the role of each course, the summaries were composed by individual faculty members, then edited and revised as a department.

These reports will be used as part of our annual content assessment program. We proposed to choose a random sample of mathematics courses and administer a brief content assessment, most likely as imbedded questions in the final examinations of each course. In 2007-2008, courses were chosen by random draw, and results are in the department's minutes.

The Mathematics Department also examined the entire Mathematics Major, particularly the Senior Thesis/Senior Seminar component. Activities included informal interviews with students, examining all senior theses and thesis presentations, and lists of courses taken by students to fulfill requirements in the mathematics major.

Assessment Results and Conclusions

After courses were chosen for content assessment, the department decided that the choices were very unfortunate for the first attempt at content assessment. For that reason, Math 306 Differential Equations, Math 105 Functions Graphs and Analysis, and Math 271 Actuarial Science were assessed. In Math 306, four 5-point multiple choice questions were added to the end of the final exam. In Math 105, fourteen 1-point multiple choice questions from the final exam were examined to address the content of the course summary. In Math 271, students took a 20-question simulated actuarial exam and the results were recorded.

In the coming year, the department will decide how data to present to the public. Results of the assessment were shared with the mathematics faculty at the fall retreat in August of 2008.

In the Math 105 assessment, all students showed acceptable competence, with scores ranging from 64% to 100% on the 14 questions. The weakest performance (25%) was on an exponential decay problem.

In Math 306, student struggled most on a question involving undetermined coefficients. While many students preferred variation of parameters for solving these problems, the underlying nature of solutions to linear equations could be stressed more in future years.

In Math 271, students scored reasonably well on the exam, with one student scoring high enough to pass an actuarial exam. Because students had not seen probability distributions in detail before, these results were deemed acceptable.

After much research and examining math majors at other instututions, the basic structure of the Mathematics Major was found to be acceptable to the department. Some courses were found to need renumbering, particularly differential equations, which is currently a sophomore-level course but is numbered 306. In addition, the department found the overall quality of the senior thesis presentations to be good, but some students were much weaker than others. We concluded that a 4 credit senior thesis course would help with this problem, and allow better students to write even better theses.

Use of Findings

The results above were shared with the entire mathematics department, including adjunct faculty, at the fall mathematics department retreat.

We will continue to refine the process of content assessment. It is clear that we have a good start, but that much work needs to be done to make the process worthwhile.

In the fall of 2008, the department plans to bring a proposal to change the Mathematics Major in the ways described above. The hiring of two new faculty members should provide the human resources needed to expand the senior seminar course from 1 credit to 4 credits.

Overview of Assessment Activities and Findings

This year's assessment activities brought to light a number of important improvements that needed to be made, and we expect to continue to assess our effectiveness in these areas. For the 2008-2009 school year, we will make the necessary changes to the Mathematics Major, and assess the content knowledge of students in 4-5 courses.

Report Prepared By: Mark Snavely
Date: 8/31/08