Food Service Management majors will develop knowledge and skills to perform well in positions of employment within the food service and restaurant industries.

Food service management interns will demonstrate applied skills worthy of recruitment for entry-level management positions by their internship supervisors.

The supervisor evaluation form for food service management interns evaluates three skill areas (personal skills, interpersonal skills, and professional characteristics including appropriate use of knowledge from the program content). Both questions from this form used as indicators are essentially overall supervisor ratings of the intern. One of them rates the interns on a Likert-type scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest rating and 5 being the highest rating. The other is a "yes-no" indicator whether the employer would hire the intern in the company for an entry-level management position. Internship is a requirement for degree completion in this program, so all food service management students are evaluated in this way. The instrument, which includes the supervisor rating of the intern that will be extracted and reported, was developed by the department faculty as a whole. Instruments used by other family and consumer sciences/food service management colleges and departments were reviewed in the development of the instrument. The attached instrument was designed to be generic for all programs in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences that require this type of internship and is published in the Internship Handbook, which serves as the textbook for the internship courses (FCS 469). The other programs that use this same form are interior design, general family and consumer sciences (without a teaching certificate), and fashion merchandising.

80% of business supervisors of food service management interns will give the intern a rating of 3.5 or higher on a 5.0 scale and 80% of business supervisors will indicate that they would hire the intern given the availability of a suitable entry-level management position in the company.

Employer evaluation ratings were available on all three of the students who earned the BS in food service management during December 2009 - May 2010.  All three supervisors rated the interns with a score of 4 or higher on a 5-point scale, so this goal was achieved at 100%.  In addition, all three supervisors indicated that they would hire the intern given the availability of a suitable, entry-level management position within the company, so this portion of the goal also was met at 100%.

An occasional weakness emerges in the internship is professional behavior such as not coming to work or taking personal time during business hours.

The findings associated with this goal indicate that food service management interns are going into the job market well-prepared and are being deemed worthy of employment by their supervisors in the food service management industry.  However, there is always room for improvement.  Internship supervisors from SHSU will strive to uncover ways in which the program can be improved through extended conversation with the business supervisors.  One obvious area to improve is professional behavior.  It is our perception that we constantly admonish regarding the importance of professional behavior; yet this area surfaced as a weakness in some interns.

The Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will graduate Food Service Management majors who have an in-depth knowledge of the content area of the major.

Students graduating from the food service management program will demonstrate the knowledge and skills necessary for entry-level management in food service/restaurant positions.

The Exit Survey for food service management majors includes multiple-choice and short-answer sections that test retention of course material and a case study that applies directly to food service management; it is graded on a pass/fail basis. (Each program area has multiple-choice, short answer, and other questions that are specific to that program content.) To develop this instrument, faculty in the content area reviewed course and program objectives and chose questions from exams that reflected important concepts that students should retain. The test is used repetitively and the scoring is consistent. For security reasons, the "test" portion (multiple-choice questions, short essay questions, and case study) is not attached. However, this document is available in the chair's office.

80% of students who complete the food service management program's Exit Survey will score a grade of Low Pass, Pass or High Pass on the content portions of the exam.

100% of students (3 students) who earned the BS in food service management during the period of December 2009 - May 2010 attained a score of Pass or High Pass on the content portion of the Exit Survey.

Students tend to do better on the essay portion of test than the multiple-choice items.  The skills needed for these different testing formats vary so that students do not appear to have the deep learning required eliminate answers on a multiple-choice format.

This finding shows that this goal was met.  The rubric will be re-visited to determine whether the "Pass" score is set at too low a level.  Faculty in the department may consider adjusting the "Pass" score so that a higher score would be required to achieve a score of "Pass."

More effort to teach test-taking skills related to multiple-choice test formats as well as deeper knowledge will be undertaken.

The Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will graduate students who have performed satisfactorily in the area of computer literacy through computer-based assignments in courses that are required of all FCS majors.

To assure competency in the area of computer literacy, students are required to complete specific assignments in FCS 268 (a written assignment requiring use of a word-processing program and a budget assignment requiring the use of a spreadsheet) and FCS 462 (a presentation using PowerPoint). Satisfactory completion of these three assignments will indicate achievement of basic computer literacy skills that students are projected to need as they graduate from FCS programs and enter the world of work.

Students who graduate from undergraduate programs in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will satisfactorily complete three assignments in courses required of all undergraduate majors in the department: a word-processed assignment and a budget prepared using a spreadsheet in FCS 268 Consumer Education and a presentation involving use of PowerPoint in FCS 462 Presentation Techniques.

90% of program majors who take the courses FCS 268 and FCS 462 during the 2009-2010 academic year will score 3 or better on a 5-point scale with 5 being the highest score and 1 being the lowest score on the three assignments that are required to meet this computer literacy competency. Examples of assignment sheets for these three assignments and rubrics for grading them are attached.

Three assignments are required to determine computer literacy competency.  One is a budget assignment for FCS 268 that is prepared on an Excel spreadsheet.  80.6% of students enrolled in FCS 268 met the rating of 3 or better on a 5-point scale.  Another of the assignments is a written assignment that is word-processed.  100% of students enrolled in FCS 268 met the rating of 3 or better on a 5-point scale.  Finally, a PowerPoint assignment was required of students in FCS 462.  89.8% of students in that course met the rating of 3 or better on a 5-point scale.

Students demonstrated weaknesses on the budget-database management assignment and on the PowerPoint presentation assignment.  Word-processing does not appear to be problematic for students.

Two portions of this goal were not met, although over 80% of all undergraduate students in the two classes during the 2009-2010 academic year were successful in the areas that impact computer literacy competency.  At least some of the problem was seen in the collection of the data.  Beginning with the Summer I 2010 session, the department chair will work with those faculty members teaching FCS 268 and FCS 462 to verify that data are collected in a way that they can be easily sorted to determine whether the computer literacy requirement is met for each individual program and at the level set by the criterion.

Specific interventions are being developed to improve budget-databse management and PowerPoint presentations.