Capstone Courses to Assess Learning

"Doing Less Work, Collecting Better Data: Using Capstone Courses to Assess Learning"
by Catherine White Berhelde
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-sp07/pr-sp07_research.cfm

As stated in article, "Assessment, therfore, is not an end in and of itself, but rather a means to an end. The end is the improvement of student learning at the individual, program, and institutional levels. Analyzing capstone projects is an efficient and effective approach to achieving that end"
This is a great piece that takes a look at using capstones to assess undergraduate education. Capstone projects assess how successfully the major has attained the overall goals, by doing so they provide invaluable information to faculty about the quality of instruction and of programs.
It was found that nearly half of the the regionally accredited colleges and universities use capstones as part of their institutions assessment program. Departments use capstone products to assess their majors in a variety of ways from public presentations to using five Likert scale items to assess how well capstone papers demonstrate achievemnet of the department's learning goals.
Case studies and examples of how capstone products are aseessed is also presented in this reseaerch article. It concludes with a final step of using data collected about student performance to improve the major. capstone-based assessments have led to addition of new courses, changes in curriculum as well as pedagogy or course format.
conclusion, departments that have used capstones to assess their majors have found that it leads to improved student learning.