NCJ Number
216477
Journal
Justice Quarterly Volume: 23 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2006 Pages: 409-427
Date Published
December 2006
Length
19 pages
Annotation
Based on a survey of 369 2-year and 4-year higher education institutions with criminal justice programs, this paper reports on how these criminal justice programs assess their students' performance.
Abstract
The survey found that grades were most often used to assess criminal justice students' achievement of the following common objectives among the programs: the development of critical-thinking skills, the development of writing skills, and familiarity with major theories and analytical approaches in criminal justice. The author argues, however, that grades are not the best measure of critical-thinking skills or writing skills, although grades may be an effect measure of familiarity with major theories and analytical approaches. Grades in themselves do not provide an important element of assessment, i.e., what the students are failing to learn and why. Assessment should be designed to identify those areas where students are not meeting earning objectives, followed by efforts to redesign course content and teaching methods in order to improve students' achievement of learning objectives. Many of the programs surveyed have viewed student assessment as a process whereby curriculum modifications are based on assessment results. This paper offers recommendations for such an assessment process. This was a Web-based survey that was designed and administered with "SurveyMonkey," a tool used to create Web surveys. The following 6 survey sections each contained 30 open-ended and close-ended questions: general information about the institution and type of criminal justice program, the programs' learning objectives, assessment instruments used, methods of analyzing the assessment data, application of learning assessment results, and resources available to the criminal justice program for assessment activities. 3 tables and 12 references