UWM Experiential Learning Fellowship, 2023-24 SOCIO 260 Evidence of Final Course Portfolio Impact on Career Readiness
Summary of the Assignment. This course uses a Final Course Portfolio as the capstone project in lieu of a final paper or exam. This assignment is designed to: 1) allow students to showcase their best work of the semester in a variety of areas; 2) actively reflect on the specialized knowledge and skills they have cultivated through their class engagement; 3) Leave class with a tangible “product” that they could share with future employers, educational institutions, or civic organizations as an accessible way of documenting their knowledge and skills. The instructions for this assignment are located here. Students could produce a final portfolio as a document or a website. I have included examples of student-authored Final Portfolios here (document example) and here (website example). [Note: Both students gave me permission to share their work with a wider educational community.]
Assessment. The Final Portfolios in and of themselves are a type of assessment of the learning goals I have laid out because they require students to showcase both their grasp of key course ideas and the tangible ways they have cultivated transferrable skills. Reviewing the two examples I have provided shows what clear mastery in these two areas looks like. Table 6 also showcases excerpts from additional student portfolios that further document students’ ability to communicate their subject matter expertise and how this expertise can be connected to a career, as well as how specific activities in class contributed to their transferrable skill development.
In addition to the use of the portfolios themselves as assessment tools, I also used a pre- and postclass survey to measure student improvement in these areas. Because I build in career readiness in across my course (not just the Final Portfolio Assignment), my survey assessment tool is designed to measure the impact of the class (not just the Final Portfolio Assignment) on my two central learning goals: 1) improvement in student perceptions measuring their level of expertise on key family topics and 2) improvement in student perceptions measuring their mastery of seven transferrable skills. This was done through a test/retest survey model where students complete the assessment the first week of class, before being exposed to any substantive ideas or concepts, and in the last week of class, when they are finishing their Final Course Portfolios.
The pre/post results (not shown) illustrate statistically significant improvements in student sense of content mastery. The assessment indicates that, as a class, students felt stronger mastery of seven key ideas emphasized as central learning goals by the end of the class. As a group, students believe they improved in their understanding of:
- how to think like a sociologist about family life
- how historical events influence family life for individuals of different races/ethnicities
- how social class produces different outcomes for families
- how variation in sex/gender influences families
- how family is a type of social institution
- mechanisms for growing social inequality in families
- factors contributing to family diversity
With respect to transferrable skill development, the pre/post survey assessment documented statistically significant improvement in five of seven transferrable skills (communicating via presentation, critical thinking, equity and inclusion skills, leadership, and professionalism. Improvements were also observed in teamwork and use of technology, but these were not statistically significant. There was also statistically significant improvement in students’ sense that they could explain their relevant work skills to a future employer, a task that was built into the Final Course Portfolio.
An analysis of student portfolios also illustrates students’ ability to connect and highlight ways the class could contribute value to a future career or profession. For example, one student explained:
“I expected to learn a lot about the more formal institutions of family and the traditional definitions, which we did, but was not expecting to dive so deep into the real experiences and less romantic side of family life. From learning more about the ‘traditional’ nuclear family (which was more of a blip in time than anything), to the more damming statistics of divorce and family violence. In not only learning about these things from the text, but also from sharing personal stories and experience with my fellow students, I came out the other side with a far greater understanding of the sociological framework of what a family really looks like. This learning opportunity will and has better informed me of my own experience but also that of those with whom I learn and work with. From my psychology education to my professional work as a people leader, I am now far better off in understanding the human condition. I am able to think more critically about the unknown circumstances of those I manage and when they are willing to share their experience I can understand it. I recently had an encounter with a younger person who was upset that they were in their early twenties and had no desire to get married or have kids for at least five more years and they felt a lot of discomfort around this. Pointing to the statistics from this coursework about the average age of both these life events and the increasing average age, I was able to put them at ease with the simple fact that it is more the norm than ever before. A feeling of relief washed over them before my eyes, and that is a powerful experience.”
Students also articulated how the course further developed key skills, such as problem solving: “During various point[s] in this semester I was asked to problem solve, particularly during our memo assignment. I think being able to think of solutions while also being data driven is definitely something I improved at during this course.”
Conclusion. Overall, both the course design and the Final Portfolio assignment appears to improve student awareness in two important areas that are connected to career readiness. First, the course design focuses students on thinking carefully about how the specialized knowledge they are learning can be applied in real-world ways. The portfolio provides students with a place to practice articulating the connections among key sociological concepts and their applicability to a future career. The course is also built around the idea of developing transferrable skills in seven different areas. The portfolio assignment provides students with a key opportunity to link their class activities to the development of these skills in very specific ways. The learning they do in this assignment, and the way they learn to package their learning, should better position them to explain how what they have done as a college student can be applied in a job after graduation.