2016 Annual Conference

Candidacy examinations have historically been gate keepers for doctoral students moving from coursework to dissertation. While administration processes vary across academic institutions, candidacy examinations typically focus on course content. This session proposes a multi-dimensional process that taps the reflections of adult education practitioners regarding program content, utility, and impact.

This session is appropriate for those interested in exploring how one doctoral program redesigned its candidacy examination process to one that better reflects adult learning principles and models the program’s philosophical orientation. The session is especially useful for faculty and program coordinators who design, administer, and evaluate candidacy examinations. However, graduate students and academic administrators who are interested in diverse methods for assessing student learning and program evaluation could benefit.

As competition among graduate programs increases and higher education is asked to certify its relevance to the community at large, some academic programs may need to develop innovative ways to meet this challenge and demonstrate how they are meeting desired student learning outcomes. While assessment of student learning and program evaluation are critical processes, they are often conducted separately and rarely integrated as a means to determine if program goals are being met.
This session offers an alternative model that one program used to incorporate data collection to assess student learning and to inform program evaluation. While presenters in this session illustrate a multi-faceted data collection approach that was conducted during candidacy examinations, the model’s adaptability to collect formative and summative data will be discussed. In addition, the presenters will describe how data were analyzed and reported back to students who participated in the process.