How Do I Develop a High-Impact Capstone Course?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

Capstone courses help students synthesize their college education before they embark on professional careers or graduate studies. The 20 Minute Mentor, How Do I Develop a High-Impact Capstone Course?, shows you how to construct a capstone course for specific learning outcomes.

During this program, presenter Barbara Jacoby, Ph.D., faculty associate for leadership and community service-learning at the University of Maryland, describes:

• The philosophy and purpose behind capstone courses
• Four models of capstone courses—departmental disciplinary, interdisciplinary, independent studies-based, and honors thesis
• Six essential steps in capstone course design
• Examples of capstone courses from different disciplines

Watch a brief clip from the program

High-impact student benefits

Sometimes described as “senior seminars” or “senior experiences,” capstone courses help students transition between their college years and careers or ongoing graduate study. This senior experience gives students the opportunity to:

• Recognize their new knowledge and skills
• Identify areas where they need work
• Solve problems in real-world situations
• Enhance critical-thinking skills
• Practice effective communication

Learning goals

After completing this program, you will be able to:

• Design a capstone course
• Articulate learning outcomes
• Select activities to help students achieve learning outcomes
• Guide students through reflection
• Evaluate student performance

Experiential learning enriches students’ senior year experiences on many levels—and can serve as a professional introduction to the field when students publish or present their work at conferences. Order this program today and enrich your students’ senior year.

How Do I Develop a High-Impact Capstone Course? includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a critical reflection worksheet, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Consider ordering a Campus Access License for an additional $100. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

I see the need for students to understand that the work they do has value-added merit as part of their overall repertoire of academic preparation and social contributions. It has become increasingly clear to me that if students realize they need to validate what they are learning for future use, they are more likely to produce a level of work that looks to future application in the workforce rather than just another required assignment.

For example, when I begin the e-portfolio class, I ask students to compile a list of items they would want to use as samples of actual work accomplishments: community service participation, papers written, projects developed, presentations, poster sessions, conferences attended, professional development, and the like. Once this list is compiled, I instruct them to create an outline indicating how these materials might be organized in an e-portfolio that they could use in a job search. The problem, of course, is that these students would have been better prepared to accumulate their materials had they been aware of this need long before they are enrolled in my e-portfolio class.

In our media-hyped, socially networked, information-at-your-smart-phone-apps world, why have we in higher education not capitalized on this process? Won’t our students need e-portfolios to be globally competitive in the job market? You might disagree, arguing that skills of the brightest and best will be clearly visible during interviews. Yes, but give me someone who can validate his or her technical, communication, and critical-thinking skills with samples of work completed previously and I will give you an individual with a distinct competitive advantage.

Recently, I attended an Oracle workshop at a neighboring university. Oracle is the largest relational database organization in the world. As part of this workshop, the speaker told students that to get a job at Oracle, they must have technical, communication, and critical-thinking skills and those skills needed to be documented in an e-portfolio! I breathed a sigh of self-validation after so many years of striving to inform students to treat this e-portfolio development process as a vital part of their overall educational experience.

E-portfolios can be handled as if they are just another one of those required assignments, without the students ever realizing their potential. Those of us who help our lifelong learners develop e-portfolios must ensure that they understand that an e-portfolio is as close to the “real world” as they will ever realize. Moreover, the content of the e-portfolio has life-changing potential. If a student becomes fully aware that a project he or she is part of or leads will be reviewed by prospective employers as integral to the hiring process, I believe that this knowledge will impact the student learning outcomes tenfold. Our colleges and universities need to recognize the importance of e-portfolio development. They should be created, reviewed, assessed, and revised across a college experience, not just in a capstone course as an afterthought to education.

My e-portfolio students leave the class with the knowledge that they didn’t just do an assignment for me. What they prepared in this class will help them achieve their future dreams. Their e-portfolios validate their past successes and demonstrate how well prepared they are for future employment.

Dr. Ken Scott is an instructor at Trenholm State Tech College.

Reprinted from Using the E-Portfolio to Validate Student Learning, The Teaching Professor, 26.1 (2012): 1.

A survey of 24 Midwestern institutions offering capstone courses for accounting majors also found wide variation in how the courses were structured. Some were configured as individual courses; others as internships, volunteer or outreach experiences; still others as research projects; and some as a combination of these options. Definitions for capstone courses also vary, although almost all can be described as “an academic culmination that draws on other courses.” (p. 267) Capstones are taken at different times as well. Some are yearlong experiences for seniors, some are taken the semester before graduation. Some institutions require capstone courses at various times during the college experience so that students begin thinking integratively about their educational experiences well before their final semester.

Is all this diversity an asset or a liability? That’s difficult to say at this point. The rich range of options is valuable for those designing capstones. Options abound. It may be, though, that more consistency is needed at the program or department level. It might be useful if there were some consensus as to the goals, objectives, structures, and assignments best suited for capstones in a given major.

That’s why this analysis of accounting capstones is a useful model. It highlights the diversity within this collection of capstones, including fairly detailed descriptions of four very different capstone courses, but it also discusses a mechanism for assessing these capstones against an established benchmark.

A professional association within accounting has identified a core competency framework. Its 20 competencies are deemed necessary for entry-level accountants. Researchers looked to see if and how this cohort of capstones was addressing those competencies. They found that the courses were “closely linked” to the development of eight of them: research, problem solving, critical thinking, reflection, synthesis, teamwork, communication, and professional orientation. (p. 271)

For many students college still tends to be experienced course by course. Even though links between and among courses are clearly visible to those of us who know the content, students often fail to see the connections. Understanding how the various courses in a major fit together to build a coherent knowledge base should be a learning outcome of every major. Capstone courses are a way of ensuring that students have the opportunity to do that integration. How it is accomplished, whether some course structures and learning activities are more successful at achieving the goal than others, remains a question still to be explored in many disciplines.

Reference: Johnson, G. F., and Halabi, A. K. (2011). The accounting undergraduate capstone: Promoting synthesis, reflection, transition, and competencies. Journal of Education for Business, 86 (5), 266-273.

Reprinted from Capstone Courses: Many Options, The Teaching Professor, 26.1 (2012): 2.

For more on capstone courses, preview the seminar Designing and Teaching a High-Impact Capstone Course »

Designing and Teaching a High-Impact Capstone Course

They spend four years taking the courses they need to earn a diploma. But are your students ready to put into action what they learned?

Capstone courses are a powerful tool to ensure that students synthesize all the disparate materials they’ve studied so that they can launch into new endeavors and tackle complex problems in graduate school, their careers and life.

The online seminar, Designing and Teaching a High-Impact Capstone Course, will walk you through a six-step process so that your capstone courses offer your students an invaluable integrative experience right before graduation.

This seminar is led by Barbara Jacoby, PhD. Dr. Jacoby teaches a high-impact capstone course at the University of Maryland, College Park and, as capstone courses have become increasingly popular at all types of colleges and universities, she has advised faculty around the country about how to develop a capstone course to meet their students’ needs.

Watch a brief clip from the seminar

Order Today

Learning goals

Help your students make the most of everything they’ve learned in and out of the classroom with Designing and Teaching a High-Impact Capstone Course, a 60-minute Magna Online Seminar.

You’ll learn how to:

• Identify and articulate desired learning outcomes for a capstone course
• Select a course model to enable students to achieve learning outcomes
• Develop guidelines for student projects
• Design opportunities and engage students in critical reflection
• Determine assessment strategies and criteria
• Showcase student achievements
• Tackle administrative and financial issues related to implementing capstone courses

In addition, you will receive questions for further discussion and self-assessment, blank versions of worksheets, and other materials to help sustain the seminar’s value as you forge ahead with your own capstone courses.

This seminar is now available on CD. The recording includes the complete transcript and all supplemental materials.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

Order Today

Intended audience

Capstone courses are as relevant to technical colleges as they are to large universities, and this seminar will offer value to faculty in all disciplines as well as to department chairs, deans, provosts, and directors of centers for teaching and learning.

A senior experience that ties it all together

Capstone courses can cement the value of your students’ educational investments, and this benefits both students and academic institutions. Learn how to do capstones the right way right away by ordering Designing and Teaching a High-Impact Capstone Course today.

“The term ‘high impact’ [in regard to practices] comes from George Kuh’s work with NSSE [National Survey of Student Engagement]. They are particularly beneficial for students in terms of academic and personal growth, career development, and a wide range of desired learning outcomes. There’s something unique about these practices. They seem to have a greater impact than what we’re used to,” Swaner says. “They tend to be very intense, not simply students walking into a lecture hall and hearing a lecture but students [being required] to learn on multiple levels. They’re creating new knowledge, implementing it in real-life settings, and reflecting on the implications for themselves and the community.”

Of these practices, service-learning and learning communities are the most common and have the largest empirical base of knowledge about them. All these practices cross-disciplinary boundaries, and participation is usually voluntary. Students who participate in these learning opportunities do so only once or twice in their college careers. “I believe [these practices] are beginning to move from the periphery a little closer to the heart of the academic mission. Still, I would characterize them as innovative practices and not the norm,” Swaner says.

Identifying high-impact practices that fit the institution’s mission
Based on her research of several institutions across the United States that have successfully implemented these high-impact learning practices, Swaner recommends that departments and institutions conduct research, join networks that have expertise in these practices, and conduct a needs assessment. “Get a sense of the benefits of these practices, what it actually means to engage students in their learning, the kind of outcomes you’re looking for, and then do a needs assessment of your own institution. What would be realistic?”

Another critical component is involving a broad array of stakeholders. A cross-constituency group should include people from academic affairs, student affairs, and community members (in the case of service-learning). “If you have as many stakeholders as you can at the table, I think it will enrich the planning process. It will also generate buy-in for this concept,” Swaner says.

This collaboration typically involves several representatives from academic affairs, several from student affairs, and a few key faculty members. In the case of service-learning, there would be two or three organization representatives who would be really engaged in this. The committee discusses questions such as “What is our mission? What are the learning outcomes we want to see from our students? What types of activities do we have going on? How can we build in more of these high-impact practices?”

“Once you start asking those questions, you start identifying resources and opportunities and challenges, and it’s that collaborative process that leads to a lot of answers. The committee or a working group will start to write grant proposals or start to look for resources and then that body of people also starts to attend conferences and network with other colleges and universities. It’s really critical to assemble that cross-constituency team or else you end up with faculty doing these things in isolation. You have student affairs people doing things in isolation, which is tremendous and impactful on students but not as successful as it could be for the entire institution.”

Support: Top down, bottom up, inside, and out
Support from key players on and off campus is also essential. “Institutions are under a lot of financial stress. At the same time, they’re trying to do a lot of innovative things, so I think it’s critical, particularly for an academic leader to really look beyond his or her own resources. Look to the institution. Is there a teaching and learning initiative? Are there institutional grants available? Are there outside grants to take a look at? If you want to do something that’s innovative and less costly, then you’re really going to have to look beyond your own means and pull in different people and different resources to make it happen,” Swaner says, adding that successful high-impact initiatives have support from the academic vice president or president.

Although support from top administrators is essential to making high-impact practices succeed, the practices cannot be imposed on a department or individual faculty members. “On the campuses I visited, initiation of these practices tended to be a hybrid of bottom up and top down. So you find interest at the academic administrative level and you find interest at the individual faculty member level, and then there’s sort of a meeting in the middle, asking, ‘What will it take to accomplish this?’ What I found is that institutions where it’s more of a grassroots effort and it’s just the faculty, it sometimes is not as successful,” Swaner says.

Because of the additional work involved in preparing and executing these learning experiences, faculty would benefit from release time from courses or other responsibilities and special consideration in the tenure and promotion process. “[High-impact practices] may be valued in some fields and on some campuses and not in others. On campuses where you have that administrative support and the administrators say, ‘We want to see our students engage in these types of experiences, then you will see them allocating the resources and allocating the priorities that enable faculty to better participate in them.”

The student experience
For the general student population, there are many positive effects, such as improvement in retention, persistence to degree, and postgraduation attainment. The effects of high-impact practices on underserved students is generally positive as well; however, there has not been much research on how these practices affect this population, Swaner says, adding that there are often barriers that can inhibit underserved students’ participation. For example, socioeconomically disadvantaged students often need to work and might not have the time to participate in a service-learning opportunity that requires a commitment of 20 hours a week.

Swaner found that service-learning in particular poses other challenges as well. Some students from underserved populations might find themselves working on a project that serves members of their own communities, which means that educators need to provide an orientation and philosophy of the program that is sensitive to the needs and experiences of these students. (For example, is the program philanthropic, communitarian, or empowering?)

Students respond positively to high-impact practices, Swaner says, but they do pose additional challenges. “Students find them to be worthwhile and connected to their lives. These experiences help give them direction and skills for career choice. Obviously this is not the only goal, but it is a goal of students. One negative piece about it, and this speaks to the intensity of these experiences, is that students report that [high-impact practices] are a tremendous amount of work, that it’s eating up a lot of their time and energy and effort,” Swaner says.

In addition, the intensity of these high-impact practices can make other learning experiences disappointing. “It almost makes the rest of their college experience difficult for them because it sets the bar so high in terms of what their engagement should be, and then if they don’t have another high-impact experience, they express disappointment that they weren’t able to continue that type of intense learning experience. That’s one of the main reasons [to think] about ways to integrate it across curriculum, across departments.”

Assessment
Assessment is an important part of understanding the effects of high-impact practices. “Once you get all those folks around the table, you kind of have to develop a common language for your institution. Student affairs folks may talk about learning in one way, and faculty members may talk about it in another way. But they start to craft a common language and begin to understand what each other is saying. For example, what does it mean for a student to develop critical thinking? That might mean different things to different people. In terms of assessment and evaluation, colleges and universities that are at the beginning of this process are in a good place because they have that opportunity to build in assessment and evaluation as they start these programs,” Swaner says.

Swaner suggests tapping into the following resources to assess these practices: the institutional research office and faculty members with educational research experience. “Departments should really be looking to partner with institutional research offices because that is sort of the clearinghouse of data. Those folks are very knowledgeable about how to do research related to their students in the programs that exist. There are some schools that are already participating in NSSE, and there are other surveys as well. There may be data there, so partnering with the IR office is key,” Swaner says.

If your campus has a school of education, there are likely a substantial number of faculty who have experience with educational research and are looking to do meaningful projects. “Pulling those folks into a cross-constituency team can really make a difference in terms of what you’re able to evaluate and whether you’re able to tell if you’re effective or not. They can also help you tie your findings to the larger picture.”

Reprinted from “Implementing High-Impact Learning” Academic Leader, 27.11 (2011): 7-8.

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The course is designed to assess the acquisition of three skills—critical thinking, written communication, and oral communication—across the 10 courses that make up the political science major. The course also aspires to “expose students to a holistic review of political science as a discipline, reviewing the broader themes that link the various subfields together; and allow students to reflect on their experience in the major and consider future applications of the major’s themes and skills to a variety of civic and professional contexts.” (p. 524)

A variety of innovative assignments are used to accomplish these goals. The primary activity is a simulated academic conference. Students select a paper they have written for one of their political science courses and prepare it for presentation in this course. The instructor organizes the papers into panels that are presented during four of the eight weeks of the course. The instructor chairs these panels and facilitates a wide-ranging discussion of the papers. The goal of the discussion is to raise questions that pertain to central issues within the field such as power, citizenship, accountability, and legitimacy. The papers are also used to assess critical thinking and writing skills. Each paper is assessed by the instructor and two randomly selected students. All three reviewers use a detailed rubric contained in the article. The instructor uses another rubric (also contained in the article) to assess the oral communication skills displayed in this presentation and in the learning-through-teaching activity described below.

Three other activities contribute more assessment data. In a course mapping exercise students rate each of the 10 major courses in terms of how well they enhanced the four key learning goals expressed in the departmental mission statement: critical thinking, written and oral communication, and understanding the discipline. Students also complete an open-ended exit survey “that asks them to anonymously and candidly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the program and faculty, and to make recommendations for future development.” (p. 525)

Finally, students complete a learning-through-teaching activity. For this activity, a pair of students makes a 30-minute presentation and facilitates a discussion of it with groups of about 10 beginning students enrolled in a large 100-level American government course. Students may do the presentation on a topic of their choosing, but it must contain substantive content and engage students in discussion.

Besides describing the course design, the authors also share the assessment results produced and in doing so demonstrate what valuable assessment data a course like this can produce. For example, when assessing students’ critical thinking, writing and oral communication skills, the communication skills were consistently lower than departmental expectations. In reviewing course mapping data, they discovered that students perceived only two of their major courses as enhancing their communication skills.

The authors write candidly: “The results from assessment through the capstone have illuminated both programmatic strengths and weaknesses. Maintaining the status quo on strengths is an easy task. However, taking action to address the weaknesses is a more significant undertaking.” (p. 527) To redress the oral communication deficiency, faculty members agreed to include more oral exercises in their courses, although content and class size make this difficult. It was this feedback that encouraged the development and implementation of the learning-through-teaching activity in the capstone. Departmental faculty also decided to piggyback onto a recent university general education requirement for a public speaking course.

There has been considerable faculty resistance to programmatic assessment. How will the data be collected and how will it be used? Those concerns are legitimate, but an article like this shows that collection of data can be done using viable processes and the data collected can be used to benefit students, faculty, and the program. “Using results generated by the capstone, our department is building a culture of assessment that facilitates across-the-board programmatic enhancement and boosts student learning opportunities.” (p. 528) As the authors note in the opening quote, this is an adaptable and adoptable course design model—and, we would add, not just for political science degree programs.

Reference: Sum, P. E., and Light, S. A. (2010). Assessing student learning outcomes and documenting success through a capstone course. PS: Political Science and Politics, 43 (3), 523-531.

Excerpted from The Teaching Professor, 25.6 (2011): 7.

Learning Outcomes for All Students
A large majority of institutions surveyed (78%) say that they have a common set of intended learning outcomes for all their undergraduate students. Stated learning outcomes at these institutions include a wide array of cross-cutting skills and areas of knowledge, including many on which earlier surveys suggest employers want colleges to focus.

The skills most widely addressed in college and university goals are writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, oral communication, intercultural skills, information literacy, and ethical reasoning. The knowledge areas most often required for all students are humanities, sciences, social sciences, global cultures, and mathematics.

“The findings from this survey indicate an important shift in focus for American higher education away from measuring progress by students’ seat time and accumulation of credits toward clarifying more transparently what students are expected to learn,” said AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider. “Colleges and universities increasingly are emphasizing educational practices that help students both achieve essential learning outcomes and also demonstrate their achievement across multiple levels of learning.”

One area where survey respondents acknowledge the need for improvement is in communicating the importance of these outcomes to their students. Among those institutions with common learning outcomes, only 5% of those surveyed say that they think almost all students understand their institution’s intended learning outcomes. Another 37% believe that a majority of their students understand them.

Most colleges assess cumulative learning outcomes at the departmental level rather than in general education. Nonetheless, nearly half (48%) of institutions surveyed are assessing at both the departmental level and in general education. Fully 94% either are already assessing (52%), or plan to assess (42%), general education learning outcomes across multiple courses. In an earlier AAC&U survey published in 2000, only 32 percent of institutions reported that they assessed student performance relative to general education goals either “very much” or “quite a lot.”

Colleges and universities are using a variety of approaches to assess learning outcomes:

• 40% use rubrics
• 37% use capstone projects
• 35% use student surveys for assessment purposes.
• 16% use standardized national tests of general knowledge.
• 26% use standardized national tests of general skills, such as critical thinking.

For a full report on the findings of this survey, click here.

Tom C. Roberts, assistant dean for recruitment and leadership development in the College of Engineering at Kansas State University, says that perhaps senior faculty members should teach more introductory courses because the generational differences between the current young faculty members and first-year students are greater than those between the senior faculty members and first-year students. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Roberts bases this assertion on generations theory, particularly the work of Strauss and Howe, which proposes a 90-year cycle in which societal changes affect the general characteristics of each generation. The theory proposes a succession of four types of generations, each of which lasts 17 to 23 years: idealist, reactive, civic, and adaptive.

The current idealist generation (indulged as children, come of age as narcissistic young crusaders, cultivate principle as moralistic mid-lifers, and emerge as wise elders) is the Baby-Boom generation (people born between 1943 and 1960). Boomers went to college in the ’60s and ’70s and generally sought an approach to learning that gave them the freedom to problem solve in a less restrictive manner than what their professors offered.

Generation X, the current reactive generation (grow up under-protected, alienated young adults, mellow into pragmatic mid-life leaders) take a random approach to problem solving and are more skeptical than Boomers.

The Millennials, the current civic generation (grow up protected, come of age as heroic young team workers, demonstrate hubris as energetic mid-lifers, and emerge as powerful elders), are generally more sequential thinkers. They grew up with a lot more structure than Xers and generally need more guidance in their classes.

“When you’ve got Boomers and Xers who wanted freedom and didn’t want all that control suddenly teaching students who need more control, this starts to set up conflict within the classroom which is almost the reverse of the kind of conflict we had in the ’60s and ’70s,” Roberts says.

The Boomers’ more formal approach to teaching (relative to Xers) and experience teaching a variety of students might make them better suited to teaching Millennials, Roberts says. Having senior faculty members (Boomers) teach introductory courses and junior faculty members (Xers) teach capstone courses could help Millennials more readily adapt to a new learning environment and also help develop Xers as teachers more quickly “by giving them the opportunity to learn some things they didn’t pick up because of their random approach to learning,” Roberts says.

Convincing faculty that reversing teaching assignments is in the best interest of the department can be difficult, and department chairs and heads should not force such a change, Roberts says. The department needs to carefully consider the issue, and, in some cases, members need to be convinced. Roberts and his colleague, John O. Mingle, have worked with departments on this issue for the past four years in a variety of venues, using a three-step process:

• Educate the faculty members about generational differences. “We get some defensive behavior, but when we have the right mix of people and a good facilitator, we can turn that into some very thoughtful discussion,” Roberts says.
• Relate the generational differences to the teaching that occurs in the department’s courses.
• Look at the curriculum and student development throughout the curriculum in light of the findings in the first two steps. This may involve changing teaching assignments or the timing in which certain things are taught.

Because generations theory deals in general characteristics of generation, it is important to remember that people do not fit neatly into categories. “You have to be careful about putting people in boxes, but the trends are there. They are very distinctive over time and over the general social context. But as always, we have to pay attention to individual students. That never goes away, but our general approach might change,” Roberts says.

Excerpted from Rethinking Teaching Assignments: Should Senior Faculty Teach More Introductory Courses? Academic Leader, April 2005.

Some of this reflection, summary, and ending occurs inevitably, but all of it can be expedited by a capstone college course experience. According to Jervis and Hartley (referenced below) in order to effectively end a college career and begin a professional one, capstone courses should:

• Promote the coherence and relevance of general education.
• Promote connections between general education and the academic major.
• Foster integration and synthesis within the academic major.
• Explicitly and intentionally develop important student skills, competencies, and perspectives that are tacitly or incidentally developed in the college curriculum.
• Improve seniors’ career preparation and pre-professional development, that is, facilitate their transition from the academic to the professional world.

A survey of capstone courses summarized in the article referenced below found that capstone courses most often integrated and synthesized content within the academic major, according to student reports.

In thinking about a capstone course currently offered in one’s department or when contemplating the possibility of adding one to the curriculum, the special challenges involved in designing, presenting, and then assessing learning in these culminating courses should not be underestimated. Much like the introductory general education course, where a whole field must be overviewed for a less-than-captivated crowd, capstone courses must address different but equally challenging instructional realities.

Typically courses in a curriculum are not well connected to one another. Helping students integrate learning across courses so that they can see a field’s coherence only happens if the teacher has broad content knowledge. It also requires sophisticated synthesis. Further, if they are to realize their objectives, these courses cannot rely on objective assessment methods such as multiple-choice exams. Students need to write, make oral presentations, and work with others on group projects. This adds to the design complexity, as well as the time that must be devoted to grading.

The lofty goals that capstone courses can accomplish make them worth the effort. We know how important first experiences in college are. We need a greater appreciation of how equally important a final summarizing experience can be.

Reference: Jervis, K. J., and Hartley, C. A. (2005). Learning to design and teach an accounting capstone. Issues in Accounting Education, 20 (4), 311–339.

Excerpted from Academic Leader, February 2006.