Some of the program weaknesses identified by this assessment will be mitigated by the offering of a new course; Environmental Geography. This new course will directly focus upon material pertaining to the awareness of physical systems and the relationships between the environment and human society.  The addition of new faculty member will also enable us to strengthen our concentration in Environmental Geography via the offering of new courses focused on this subject matter. Certain other learning gaps identified by the assessment may simply reflect weaknesses with the assessment itself.  For example, we offer a few courses that focus on regional geography (World Regional Geography, Regional Geography of U.S. and Canada), that would naturally focus more directly on “places and regions” than would the courses incorporated in this assessment. In the future we will embed assessment questions within the comprehensive finals associated with these regional courses.  The most critical weaknesses identified from this assessment remain in the areas of learning major geographic principles and critical thinking.  The scores from students enrolled in one course (GEOG 1321) did improve for these areas, We plan to continue to experiment with ways to enhance critical thinking in both lab and lecture formats, and will make concerted efforts to incorporate assignments and methods found to be successful in GEOG 1321 at generating positive learning outcomes.    

Two of the courses - GEOG 1401 (formerly 1301) and GEOG 1321 - utilized for this assessment have been fully redevolped so that they comply with the new core curriculum, which goes into effect in Fall 2014.  During this process these courses were specifically restructured so that they would facilate the exact learning outcomes reflected in the goals of this assessment, such as critical learning and awareness of major geographic principles.  Two other courses (GEOG 2355 & 2356) were also redeveloped for the new core, both emphasizing the teaching of other recognized goals (ex. "places and regions").  These two courses were utilized for assessment for the first time this past spring, but results are not yet in a format that could be presented here.  Given the restructuring of these courses to more directly serve the goals outlined on this assessment, analysis of student outcomes associated with future sections of these courses will be informative.  A new Environmental Geography course was taught for the first time in Spring 2014, a course which focuses more directly on physical systems and human-environment interaction than any other course in our curriculum.  These same two subject areas represent two identifable weaknesses within our program. Given that this brand new course was offered by a new faculty member, it was not possible to generate results as of yet.  We fully expect to have a better picture during the next assessment cycle of how well our program is doing at enhancing this particular need.

Many of the weakenesses identified by student outcomes from this assessment represent weaknesses that have also been recognized on previous assessments.  To that effect, we have proactively redesigned some of our courses to better serve the needs for enhanced critical critical thinking and to faciliate the learning of both basic and major geographical concepts.  We have also attempted to replicate methodologies proven to be efffective in some courses (GEOG 1321) so that they could be implemented in other courses.  Some of these methodologies, when applicable, will be implemented in lab sections so that we can take advantage of the intimacy of smaller class sizes.  We plan to further improve upon this overall endeavor by incorporating the assessment of additional courses that better serve certain specifc goals, such as World Regional Geography and Environmental Geography.  These courses should offer a better test of how well we our program is doing at teaching "regions and places" and "physical systems," respectively.  Perhaps the biggest change we have made involves our efforts to fix the identifiable need to enhance student understanding of basic statistical measures, a weakness reflected within this assessment.  Based on these results, we have restructured our degree requirements so that all geography majors will be required to successfully complete a basic statistics course.  In addition, we have also incorporated some elementary statistical procedures within one of our introductory geography courses (GEOG 1321).  Finally, we plan to continue our efforts to experiement with different ways to enhance learning across our curriculum in order to generate positive learning outcomes.