The Department of Family and Consumer Sciences will graduate Fashion Merchandising students who perform well in positions of employment within the fashion industry.

The student will demonstrate professional competence and the ability to apply what they have learned (e.g., appropriate product knowledge, knowledge of business procedures, knowledge of industry systems) in various aspects of fashion merchandising.

The supervisor evaluation form for fashion merchandising 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-yes with reservations-no" indicator of 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 fashion merchandising 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/fashion merchandising 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 course (FCS 469). The other programs that use this same form are interior design, general family and consumer sciences (without a teaching certificate), and food service management.

At least 80% of business supervisors of fashion merchandising 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 twelve fashion merchandising B.A. graduates for 2012-2013, rating data was collected for eight.  Of the eight, 100% received a rating of 4 or 5 (i.e., greater than 3.4) by the internship supervisor/employer.  Six out of the eight (75%) received a rating of 5, and two received a rating of 4.  As to whether they would hire the intern, this data was collected on nine, and 100% of the 9 supervisors indicated they would hire the intern.  Therefore, this criterion was met.

We modifieded the evaluation form this past cycle to include three options rather than two (yes or no) as there had been in the past.  This time we divided the “yes” option into “yes, hire without reservation” and “yes, hire with reservation” in the hope of getting additional feedback for program improvement.  However, although we received both responses, there was little feedback, so we are planning to further modify the process.

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

Students graduating from the fashion merchandising program will demonstrate the knowledge and skills necessary for entry-level management in fashion retailing/merchandising positions.

The Exit Survey for fashion merchandising majors includes multiple-choice and short-answer sections that test retention of course material and a case study that applies directly to retail apparel merchandising; 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.

At least 90% of students who complete the fashion merchandising program's Exit Survey will score a grade of Low Pass, Pass or High Pass on the content portions of the exam.

Of the twelve fashion merchandising BA graduates for 2012-2013, data was collected on eight.  Of the eight, 100% passed the Exit Survey with a rating of High Pass (three out of eight or 37.5%) or Pass (five out of eight or 62.5%).  Therefore, this criterion was met.

Because 100% of students who took this Survey passed, we are working with the idea of abandoning this instrument and instead using the scoring on fourteen professional skills identified as critical to professional success on the Performance Appraisal of Student Intern as completed by the Internship Supervisor.

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.

Students will demonstrate computer literacy through specific assignments in FACs 2368 (word-processing assignment and a budget assignment using a spreadsheet) and in FACS 4362 (a presentation using PowerPoint), two courses that are required of all undergraduate majors in the department.  Satisfactory completion of these three assignments will indicate achievement of basic computer literacy skills that students are projected to need as they graduate from fashion merchandising programs and enter the world of work.

There is a specific common rubric for each assignment.

At least 90% of program majors who take the courses FACS 2368 and FACS 4362 during the 2011-2012 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.

Of the 12 students who completed FACS 2368, 10/12 (83.3%) scored a grade of five on the project that including the word-processing and spreadsheet projects.  Therefore, this criterion was not met for these two aspects of the computer literacy measure.  Of the 12 students who took FACS 4362, 100% scored a grade of 4 or 5 on the PowerPoint presentation.  Therefore, this criterion was met for this area of computer literacy.  (These were different sets of students, although there may have been some small amount of overlap in the two groups.)

We are looking into the matter of the students who did not complete the assignments, although one of them did receive a passing grade for the course.  This assignment is given in an on-line course, and we believe that it is the specific project that is targeted for this report that is the problem, and that perhaps it is not the best measure of students' computer literacy.  Yet the university requires that we measure and report results regarding computer literacy, and this is the means that was chosen and worked well at one time.  Overall, it is obvious that students are entering the university with good computer literacy skills and are further developing these skills during their time as undergraduate students.