Program history: Environmental Studies programs arose in many colleges and universities in the early 1970's as public concern with environmental problems, the complexity of environmental issues, and academic awareness of the need for inter-disciplinary approaches to environmental questions began to coalesce into calls for a new kind of curriculum. CSUS was one of the earliest to create a full-fledged program, and one of the first to create a cohesive program with integrative courses, moving beyond the mere collection of discipline-based courses under an environmental rubric. The Environmental Studies faculty, in close consultation with other faculty and students, created a program that had to be thought out carefully in terms of its objectives and methods. The program became one of a number of models for programs adopted subsequently at scores of other schools.

At CSUS, the emphasis has been on basic science literacy, statistical competence, writing proficiency, analytical skill, and integration of scientific knowledge with insights from the social sciences and humanities. Student electives, particularly the choice of a mandatory minor, complement the basic core requirements. At some other universities, faculty have tended to create environmental studies curricula that rely much more heavily on a menu of relevant science courses, with relatively little integrative work using the social sciences and humanities; or, they have created curriculum with relatively little science, focused on policy or attitudinal and individual behavior issues. At CSUS, we have traveled the middle road between these two other models, insisting on the integration of knowledge from science, social science, and the humanities, while allowing students to shape their education further through their choice of the mandatory minor.

 

Curricular development and assessment: The Environmental Studies curriculum ensures that students must be able to succeed in upper-division courses using concepts from sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. Several courses are quantitative in nature, including: General Ecology (requiring eleven units of lower division pre-requisites), the upper division economics choice (requiring six units of lower division pre-requisites), Quantitative Methods for Environmentalists, and other science courses chosen as electives. Some require the use of concepts from the social sciences and humanities, and the integration of this material with scientific information and concepts, including Environmental Ethics, International Environmental Problems, and Environment and the Law; all of these courses also require evaluating competing perspectives and the formation and justification of value choices in written and oral form and through group work. Some require field observation and analysis, such as Field Methods for Environmentalists. Several courses require extensive writing, including Environmental Ethics, International Environmental Problems, Environment and the Law, and the senior thesis or senior seminar. Throughout the courses taught by the Environmental Studies faculty itself, as in some of the courses taken in other departments, students are required to work in groups, identify problems and suggest ways to arrive at solutions, and discuss and defend their ideas.

The overall choice and design of the major courses has not grown up simply as a matter of ensuring that the material of a discipline was covered during the students' education. Rather, from the first, the goal was as stated in the catalog, "to help students understand environmental problems in their political, social, and scientific context. Because dealing with environmental problems requires an interdisciplinary approach, we emphasize the development of strong writing, research, and quantitative skills and a broad liberal arts perspective." The Environmental Studies faculty believes that satisfactory completion of these courses, complemented by an appropriate mandatory minor, and the required C- grade in all courses for the major, is the primary means of assessment of student preparation.

 

The original senior thesis. Approximately fifteen years ago, the Environmental Studies faculty concluded that a capstone requirement of a senior thesis would help students integrate and develop the skills they had acquired in the other course work, and would provide a method of evaluating how well prepared they were for doing so. Evaluation of student work would also help faculty evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum and individual courses. We have been requiring a senior thesis of all E.S. graduates since that time, and for many years have been saving copies of each student's thesis in our archive files of graduates. There is no question that the thesis requirement has met most of our expectations as described in terms of assessing both student skills and the curriculum. Faculty discuss the performance of senior thesis students on a semester-by-semester basis, using the information to adjust both the senior thesis requirements and the design of other courses in the curriculum.

 

The senior thesis evolves: Many students have a difficult time identifying and choosing a senior thesis topic quickly and firmly enough to allow planning and completion of the thesis in one semester. After experimenting with allowing or encouraging students to take two semesters to complete the task, we abandoned that approach because it tended to encourage procrastination. It also created an unreasonable burden and confusion for faculty who were supervising too many projects at once.

Two more fruitful approaches have been to allow students to satisfy the senior thesis requirement through completion of a seminar paper in such courses as Environmental Quality and Social Justice, or to shape the senior thesis class into a thematic seminar environment in which choices were better identified and properly narrowed. We have been using these two approaches in recent years with some success. We would now like to formalize this approach to make the situation clearer for students and more manageable for faculty.

Environmental Studies has submitted a program change proposal that creates senior seminars from two existing courses: Environmental Quality and Social Justice, and Environmental Politics and Policy. A third senior seminar, Scientific Issues in Environmental Studies, will also be proposed. Most students will satisfy the senior thesis requirement through completion of one of these senior seminars, which will always involve the completion of a research paper to be called a senior thesis. Some students, at the discretion of instructors, will be allowed to satisfy the requirement through an E.S. 198 experience, individually supervised, when faculty consider that the students are prepared to do so. The usual criteria for E.S. 198 students will be a high GPA, a clearly defined project, and a history of self-motivated and responsible work.

 

Adding a portfolio requirement: Beginning in the Fall of 2000, entering Environmental Studies students will be required to build a portfolio. They will be instructed on how to do so in Environmental Studies 111, normally the first upper-division course taken by our majors. The portfolio will contain, as a minimum, two essay assignments and, either an additional essay assignment or an essay examination. These three pieces must be taken from at least two different courses. It will also include the senior thesis paper. It may also include additional written assignments or projects, internship or cooperative education reports, and other material at the student's discretion after consultation with a faculty member in the senior seminar before graduation. The portfolio will be a requirement of the senior seminar experience, in addition to the thesis project written in the seminar.

Once the portfolio has been assembled in the Senior Seminar, the student will be required to complete it by writing his or her own "reflective evaluation" of the work in the portfolio, discussing proud accomplishments and areas where the student judges further thought, study, or experience could improve the students skills and performance.

 Assessment summarized: Under this plan, Environmental Studies majors will be assessed using three methods: course grades, a senior thesis, and a portfolio.

Desired outcomes: Some outcomes are best assessed by course completion and grades, some by the portfolio and thesis requirements, some by a combination.

 Specific course based outcomes and appropriate courses:

• Ability to write and speak clearly and persuasively: E.S. 111, 112, 118, senior seminar/thesis.
• Ability to reason quantitatively: Bio. 160, Econ. 1A, 1B, upper division Econ. elective, E.S. 120, senior thesis where appropriate to project.
• Ability to understand and use basic science concepts: Bio. 10, 11, 12, 160, Chem 6A, Geol. 10, upper division science choice, E.S. 121. Senior thesis.
• Ability to integrate social science and humanities concepts with scientific ideas and information in analyzing environmental problems: E.S. 111, 112, 118, upper division Econ. choice, Senior thesis.
• Ability to work in groups in analyzing environmental problems and reaching agreement on solutions: E.S. 111, 112, 118, 121.
• Ability to use economic tools to assess actions affecting the environment, including cost/benefit techniques: Econ. 1A, 1B, upper division Econ. choice.
• Ability to use legal concepts in understanding environmental problems and legal approaches to them: E.S. 118
• Ability to describe and analyze environmental problems taking into account differing problems among nations and international interactions among nations regarding environmental matters: E.S. 112.
• Ability to identify, understand, and evaluate competing perspectives and interests in environmental issues: E.S. 111, 112, 118, upper division Econ. choice, senior thesis.
• Ability to carry out research tasks appropriate to analyzing environmental problems: E.S. 112, 118, 121, upper division Econ. choice, senior thesis.
• Ability to use the concepts and methods of at least one academic discipline at a higher level of skill than may be implied by the above: completion of a minor as part of the E.S. major requirement.

 This list is by no means all-inclusive of the course content of major courses.

 General outcomes from the entire curriculum:

• Ability to identify and discuss the origins of a significant sub-set of the specific major environmental problems facing society at present.
• Ability to apply the basic principles of ecology and other relevant sciences to the analysis of environmental issues.
• Ability to think politically in terms of strategies and tactics in dealing with environmental problems.
• Ability to intelligently anticipate and discuss sources of new environmental threats.
• Ability to work with people of many personal backgrounds and professional qualifications in analyzing and dealing with environmental problems.
• Ability to continue to learn new information, skills, and concepts as needed in dealing with environmental problems.
• Ability to identify and deal intelligently with ethical choices as a professional, as a parent, as a citizen, and as a person regarding environmental issues.
• Ability to define simple research tasks and carry them out and to assist in more complex research tasks as required for professional work in the environmental field.
• Ability to identify and carry out thoughtful approaches to resolving environmental problems, recognizing when and how it is necessary to work with others.
• Ability of superior students to find placement in graduate and professional schools.

 What the portfolio should reveal: It would be absurd to maintain that all of our graduates will succeed in achieving all of these outcomes. It is reasonable to expect that they will be able to demonstrate an ensemble of them composed of a sub-set of the total, determined by their own individual strengths and weaknesses. In the final analysis, the outcomes will be assessed by whether the student is able to behave as an intelligent person reasonably well-informed on environmental issues, working effectively with others, communicating well, and recognizing the sharp limitations of his or her own knowledge and the necessity to always learn more. The thesis and portfolio, taken together with grades, should provide a reasonable way to assess whether this has been achieved.

 Evaluation of assessment strategies: Each year, the Environmental Studies faculty will choose a number of representative portfolios for reading and evaluation, ranging from best to poorest students. The faculty will discuss the degree to which the portfolios reveal success in reaching the desired outcomes of the curriculum. They will record any conclusions and take appropriate actions.

March 1999