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.

Of the three program graduates for the time period August 2010 through May 2011, two of the three received overall performance ratings of 4.5 on a 5-point scale, and one received an overall performance rating of 3.0 (met at 67%).  However, all three supervisors indicated that they would hire the intern for a suitable entry-level management position in the company (met at 100%).  Therefore, this criterion was partially met.

Part of the difficulty with identifying an appropriate action for this objective lies with knowing and working with the three students over a substantial period of time.  The one of the three who received the lower rating had never worked for pay until she secured the position that would become her internship position.  The other two had considerable work experience, and no doubt this impacted the overall evaluation scores.  In fact, one of the interns was a "re-hire" with the company where he completed the internship and the supervisor talked at some length as to why he wanted to re-hire this student intern.  It seems as though one appropriate action would be to encourage students who are planning to pursue degrees in food service management to seek out restaurant or food service experience well in advance of the time of the internship.  In addition to the good work experience of the two who received higher ratings, all three of these students have a good attitude in regard to wanting to learn how to do work functions efficiently and well.  No doubt this impacted the supervisors' assessments in regard to hiring them for  suitable entry-level management positions.

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.

Two out of three of program graduates for the period August 2010 through May 2011 (67%) scored a grade of at least "Pass" on the content portion of the Exit Survey.  Therefore, this criterion was not met.

Again, it must be noted that the one student out of three who did not score a grade of at least "Low Pass" on the content portion of the Exit Survey was in general a very poor test-taker and most likely a poor reader.  Learning disabilities are well-documented for this student, and the department placed no time limit on completion of the Exit Survey.  Perhaps an oral exam would have been a more appropriate administration technique and should be considered in the future for students with well-documented learning disabiltiies.

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.

These students did well with the computer literacy assignments.  The data collection process was changed so that a single score on each student was calculated, using Excel Spreadsheet-based assignments, word-processed assignments, and PowerPoint assignments.  All three program graduates (100%) met the criterion for the computer literacy assignments, with one score of 3.5 and two who scored 4.5, all on a 5-point scale. 

100% of students in this program met the university's requirements for computer literacy as part of the undergraduate curriculum.  However, the instructors who teach teh course believe that additional work in the area of database management is needed.