Master of Professional Communication

• Graduate Certificate (Not Applicable)

   

• Associate Degree (Not Applicable)

   

• Graduate Degree

  At the end of their study at WSU, students in this program will:

  • Write and edit at a level commensurate with a communication leader or manager in applied communication contexts.
  • Present information orally and in visual form at a level commensurate with a communication leader or manager in an applied communication context.
  • Demonstrate critical thinking and cultural competence in applied communication contexts.
  • Conduct academic or applied research in communication contexts, report findings clearly and accurately, and interpret the meaning of research data.
  • Demonstrate knowledge in one or more cognate areas – strategic communication, organizational communication, and media

The Master of Professional Communication program emphasizes the knowledge and advanced communication skills working professionals need to succeed in today's rapidly evolving and technologically complex world. Students hone their skills in writing, speaking, new media and research methods. They take cognate courses in team building and facilitation, organizational leadership, and strategic communication. The program is designed to prepare effective leaders, team members, and employees in corporate, government and nonprofit organizations.

Graduates work in fields such as public relations, education, health care promotion and organizational training and development. Many students use the MPC degree to advance to strategic communication leadership roles within their chosen career field. Others use the degree to make a career change to a field that is more closely aligned with their interests, knowledge and skills in communication. A few students seek opportunities to work in higher education and may enter a doctoral program in communication.


Contact Information:
Dr. Sarah Steimel
Weber State University
1407 University Circle
Elizabeth Hall, room 346
(801) 626-6535

MPC Website

Assessment Plan for Master of Professional Communication:

• Persons responsible for collecting and analyzing the data: The program director will oversee data collection. The MPC faculty advisory committee, which consists of all faculty teaching the required courses in a given academic year, will serve as the Assessment Committee to oversee and implement the program’s assessment plan. MPC faculty may be asked to collect and report data on assignments in their classes and may be asked to review papers and other artifacts for assessment purposes. 
• Assessment measures to be used: The MPC assessment plan examines student outcomes using the following direct and indirect measures.

 
Direct Measures (DM):

• Student theses and projects submitted Student performance on signature assignments with rubric in MPC 6010 Introduction to Grad Studies & Communication Theory Student performance on signature assignments with rubric in MPC 6150 Writing for Professional Communicators Student performance on signature assignments with rubric in MPC 6210 Presentational Speaking Student performance on signature assignments with rubric in MPC 6700 Research Methods for Professional Communication Student performance on signature assignments with rubric in cognate area courses: MPC 6100 Team Building and Facilitation, MPC 6250 Visual Communication, MPC 6300 New Media, MPC 6400 Leadership Communication, MPC 6450 Advanced Organizational Communication, and MPC 6600 Strategic Communication
•  
• To collect indirect measures every year, which include number of students/graduates who receive a promotion or a new job in a field related to professional communication, number of students accepted for further graduate study, individual feedback from students and graduates.

Goals:

• To assess core skill areas of writing, speaking, critical thinking and research methods on a semi-annual basis. For example, in 2014-15 we assessed writing and speaking. In 2015-16, we will assess critical thinking and research methods. In 2016-2017, we will again assess writing and speaking, etc. To assess the core cognate courses on a rotating basis. These courses include MPC 6100 Team Building and Facilitation, MPC 6250 Visual Communication, MPC 6300 New Media, MPC 6400 Leadership Communication, MPC 6450 Advanced Organizational Communication, and MPC 6600 Strategic Communication. In 2015-16 we will assess MPC 6250 and MPC 6300. In 2016-2017, we will assess MPC 6100 and 6400, etc.  As new courses are added to the core cognate areas, they will be worked into the assessment rotation.

Indirect Measures (IM):

• Verbal and written feedback from individual graduates Data on promotions and job placement, graduate and professional school acceptance, and other significant accomplishments
• Number of papers accepted for presentation at academic and professional conferences

• 2021-2022

   

• 2019-2020

  1)    First year student success is critical to WSU’s retention and graduation efforts. We are interested in finding out how departments support their first-year students. Do you have mechanisms and processes in place to identify, meet with, and support first-year students? Please provide a brief narrative focusing on your program’s support of new students:

  a.    Any first-year students taking courses in your program(s)

  As a Master’s program, we are not really seeing “first year students” as the university defines them (e.g. as first-time freshman). However, of course we try to support all students who are new to our program (e.g. are “first time masters students”)! 

  The graduate program director serves as the academic advisor for prospective and current MPC students. The program director advises prospective students before and during the admissions process. 

  Once admitted, the program director sends an email with information about course offerings and required courses for first year students a few weeks before registration opens each semester. So, all students (including first-time students) receive advising emails from the director each semester.  Students regularly request more advising appointments (both in advance of registration and during the course of the normal semester) and the program director regularly meets with students, including first year students. 

  The graduate program director also always attends the first evening of the first required MPC course – the MPC 6010 Introduction to Graduate Studies & Theory. This means that every first-year student meets the director in the first semester; and at that general advising presentation they are told about the program, given advice, and encouraged to contact the director for additional appointments. 
   
  Second year students are still sent advising emails before registration opens each semester with course descriptions and general advising information. Second year students also typically meet with the program director between their first and second years or early in their second year to plan their electives and a path to graduation. 

  Students who “stop out” by not enrolling during the program are contacted by the program director to see what supports or opportunities can be provided to support the student.

  Beyond the director, our relatively small program prides itself on intensive connections between faculty and students. Our faculty are very actively engaged and care deeply about student retention, success and graduation. 

  
  b.    Students declared in your program(s), whether or not they are taking courses in your program(s)

  
  Same as above, generally, we communicate frequently with students in and out of the classroom.

  
  2)    A key component of sound assessment practice is the process of ‘closing the loop’ – that is, following up on changes implemented as a response to your assessment findings, to determine the impact of those changes/innovations. It is also an aspect of assessment on which we need to improve, as suggested in our NWCCU mid-cycle report. Please describe the processes your program has in place to ‘close the loop’.

  As a program, we believe assessment data is useful to the extent that we use it to consistently refine, clarify and modify our curriculum to ensure our students are succeeding in our program mission to “prepar[e] working professionals with the advanced communication knowledge and skills needed to excel in a range of communication-related careers.” We believe our assessment efforts demonstrate ways in which we use that feedback loop on a regular basis.

  Each year, our MPC faculty committee meets several times to discuss issues related to assessment and curriculum, and each year we have made changes to the program’s curriculum (ranging from major curriculum changes to more specific class content changes) based on the data. As an example of a major curriculum overhaul, we saw some consistent patterns that our students were not evidencing achievement of the desired research methods skills by the end of the single research methods course. We started by joining the 6010 and 6700 courses together in a required sequence so that students would have more scaffolding in research, writing and critical thinking before taking 6700. We saw data (and heard anecdotally as well) that this improved student outcomes. However, we felt improvement was still possible. So, after investigating similar masters programs across the country, we decided as a faculty that this may be due, in part, to a need to split quantitative and qualitative methods into separate courses. We put that through the curriculum process last spring and this fall and we are piloting the split class for the first time this fall (2020) and spring (2021). 

  As an example of a more granular curriculum adjustment, as I said, when we saw that presentational skills were still a challenge for some of our students in the 6210 courses through assessment data, we refined the 6210 course itself to include more low-stakes practice presentations AND we agreed to integrate presentation opportunities into more courses (including the 6010 course, for instance) to give students more scaffolded practice before they reach the 6210 course. 

  We have also, at a more macro level, adjusted our program learning outcomes to reflect what we expect students to be learning and to help us emphasize key skills that need to be assessed. So, for instance, we added visual communication explicitly to our presentations outcome this past year. We have always considered visual skills to be part of presentations, but when that wasn’t called out specifically in the learning outcome, we didn’t have folks uniformly emphasizing and measuring it. So, updating our outcomes allows us to hold conversations about how to best teach and measure key skills in our courses. 

  We are absolutely continuing work in this process, as we are using the new Canvas rubrics developed for our program assessment starting in Fall 2020 and we are starting to explore a portfolio-based process for our students as part of their capstone experience.  Our program will continue to meet regularly to collect, reflect, and modify our program to help students both learn and demonstrate their learning in meaningful ways. 
   

  The full report is available for viewing.

• 2017

  1) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • As mentioned on page 11, Our undergraduate program (Department of Communication) has done substantial work in the last year to standardize assessment definitions and develop uniform scales across classes (including a five point scale to measure the extent to which students fail to meet, meet, or exceed expectations on measured learning outcomes and clear definitions of expected student performance on those measures at the “introduced”, “emphasized” and “mastered” levels. Our primary goal in the next year is to investigate, adapt, and adopt a similar system of standardized measurement across our course to make these numbers even more comparable/meaningful going forward. I have buy in from the MPC faculty to pursue this plan.

   

  • We have also, based on this assessment report and graduating student feedback, decided to offer the “core required courses” more frequently in our program to allow us to mandate the order in which they are taken. So, for instance, in the 2016-2017 school year, students could take the MPC 6150 Writing course before they take the MPC 6010 Intro to Grad Studies/Theory course. Starting Spring 2018, we will offer the Intro course (6010) every fall/spring to ensure that students newly admitted in either the Fall or the Spring start with the intro course and take writing in their second/third semester. In short, we are going to do more to ensure students take the classes in the order that best scaffolds/supports student learning across the curriculum. We believe that formative assessment on writing in the MPC 6010 Introduction to Graduate Studies class will produce stronger writers when we comprehensively assess writing in the MPC 6150 Writing class.
     

  2) We are interested in better understanding how departments/programs assess their graduating seniors or graduate students. Please provide a short narrative describing the practices/curriculum in place for your department/program. Please include both direct and indirect measures employed. Finally, what were your findings from this past year’s graduates?
   

  • We assess MPC 6900/6950 Academic Thesis & Projects for all students who complete a thesis or project in the program. Those theses or projects are typically completed in the last (or second to last) semester before graduation. These serve as direct measures of student learning on a variety of program outcomes (writing, research, theory, etc.). The thesis/project track is optional, but it is often completed by 35-50% of the graduating students.
  • We also assess final projects in all of our core elective courses. Students must take 4/6 of the core electives and students who do NOT choose the thesis/project track typically take additional course (e.g. a 5^th of the 6^th) as part of their coursework to complete for graduation. This serves as a direct measure of student learning in those courses.
  • We gather two forms of indirect measures – student exit surveys and student post-graduation employment information. Student exit surveys ask them to report on their own sense of learning (among other factors) to help us better the program. Post-graduation employment information (which is gathered primarily through LinkedIn) helps us see evidence of career success from our graduates.
  • I have spent some time looking to see if there are any reasonable normed measure we could use as an “exit” assessment for our program. There is no such measure provided by our national organization (the National Communication Association), nor could I find one for a Masters in Professional communication. As a statistics teacher myself, I wish we had a normed quantitative measure to compare, but I believe we will have to keep refining our internal assessment to measure our students. That is a big part of why we intend to spend substantial time standardizing assessment definitions and developing uniform scales across classes over the next few months.
  • Overall, we believe that our students are performing well and demonstrating evidence of learning. Though our students demonstrate some struggle on assessment measures early in the program (writing, for example, which is currently assessed in a writing class taken in the first semester or two), our measures near the end of the program demonstrate that students who have chosen to do a thesis or project, for example, are generally strong writers.
  • Our student exit surveys generally show students reporting that they feel as if they gained career-practical knowledges and skills through the program and that they use those skills in both their places of employment and their interpersonal lives. The career data we are able to track on our students do indirectly agree that students are frequently moving “up” in their careers in the time after graduation.
• 2016

  1) Reflecting on this year’s assessment(s), how does the evidence of student learning impact your faculty’s confidence in the program being reviewed; how does that analysis change when compared with previous assessment evidence?

  • Overall, we think this year’s program review indicates that our program is preparing our students with the “
  • In critical thinking, the pairing of MPC 6010 and MPC 6700 appears to have benefitted our students in terms of critical thinking. There is evidence above that the number of students demonstrating “strong” critical thinking skills improved from MPC 6010 to MPC 6700 and remained high through the MPC 6900 thesis/project class (for those who took it).  These results could not be fully compared with previous years because for some reason critical thinking was not evaluated during the last three years’ reports available on the Institutional Effectiveness Website.
  • In research methods, we did see a small decline in proficiency in 6700 (Research Methods). In the 2012-2013 report,  81% of students were rated strong and 19% were rated adequate. However, there are two complicating factors. First, in that year, research methods was taken during students’ second or third semester in the program (rather than in the first semester, as it is now). Thus, students had more time to acquire and polish those skills. Second, it isn’t clear from the 2012-2013 report whether Research skills were measured in BOTH the 6700 and 6900 (thesis/project) class. It appears it might have been just in the 6900 (thesis/project class). If that is the case, then we are actually remaining consistent. Though this year only 69.2% of students were strong in their research skills at the end of MPC 6700, 80% of those who did the 6900 thesis/project were rated as strong. Therefore, I think we can remain confident that we are providing research skills while continuing, as a group of faculty, to think about how to integrate research throughout the curriculum and better measure the end-of-program research skills of students who graduate without doing a thesis/project.
  • Based on my records, neither Visual Communication nor New Media (two of our six cognate areas) had ever been assessed. So, it is difficult to compare to previous results. The assessment outcome of Visual Communication this year was lower than was hoped (only 66.66% of students were rated as “strong”). However,  this provides us a useful baseline moving forward. We will begin conversations among the faculty who teach in the cognate areas about integrating more visual communication throughout the curriculum. 93% of the students were rated “strong” in New Media skills, which provides us a rather high baseline moving forward.

   

  2) With whom did you share the results of the year’s assessment efforts?

  • Communication/MPC Faculty, the Chair of the Department of Communication, the office of Institutional Effectiveness, the Dean of Arts & Humanities, and our External Advisory Group.
     

  3) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • Integration of MPC 6010 and 6700 as a paired sequence of classes appears to have really benefited students in their overall critical thinking skills.  As a program, we should investigate whether additional class pairings or better planned sequences can improve our students’ outcomes in other areas without sacrificing the flexibility and customization students value in our program.
  • We may need to re-evaluate the level of research methods proficiency possible in graduate students’ first semester (perhaps a standard of 75% strong in MPC 6700 is too high, given that that class is taken in the first semester). We need to also investigate how to better measure research methods proficiency later in the program for students who do not complete the thesis/project path.
  • We need to better integrate the “cognate” skill areas in more classes so that the students can reach higher levels of proficiency. For example, adding more visual communication components in other courses would likely increase the number of students who reach a “strong” proficiency in MPC 6350.
  • This year’s significant increase in marketing/communication efforts appear to be improving quantity/quality of applicants as suggested by our program review. We will continue these efforts.
  • We will be calling another meeting of our Advisory Group in Spring, 2017 to share these results with them and to see greater guidance on how we can improve going forward.

   

  The full report is available for viewing. 

• 2015

  1) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

  • We are developing a rubric to be used for assessment that is separate from the term project rubric in classes. We used part of the rubric this year to assess writing, speaking and critical thinking skills in two core courses, MPC 6600 Strategic Comm and MPC 6400 Leadership Comm.

   

  2) Are there assessment strategies within your department or program that you feel are particularly effective and/or innovative? If so, what are those strategies and what do you learn about your students by using them?

  • Assessing student projects gives us feedback about how well we are accomplishing the applied mission of the program. We will continue to assess projects and use that data to make curriculum decisions.

   

  To see the full report, select this link: MPC 2014/15 Annual Assessment Report
   

• 2014

  The Communication - graduate, program conducted a five year program review with full self-study during the spring of 2015. Those results are presented in place of the Annual Assessment Report. Please reference those documents for information that includes data for the 2013/14 academic year.

• 2013

  1) Reflecting on this year’s assessment(s), how does the evidence of student learning impact your faculty’s confidence in the program being reviewed; how does that analysis change when compared with previous assessment evidence?

  • This is the first year we have collected data and analyzed assessment results in the program. This year we looked at MPC students’ theses or projects collected when the first cohort graduated in May 2013. We are encouraged by the data. On the learning objective related to writing, 76% of students were rated “strong” and 24% were rated adequate. On the learning objective related to research methods, 81% of students were rated strong and 19% were rated adequate. While the data presents a positive assessment, we realized that the final papers housed in the library represent a lot of feedback from faculty and numerous revisions. Because students receive so much feedback from faculty and have many chances to rewrite, their final thesis or project may not be an accurate reflection of the quality of work students are capable of producing on their own. In future years we will assess writing by examining student papers in MPC 6150 Writing for Professional Communicators. We will also examine writing samples from papers in cognate areas to see how students’ writing progresses as they move through the program.

   

  • We have anecdotal evidence to suggest that at least seven students in the first cohort presented a paper at an academic conference. This represents at least 33% of the graduating class. Submitting to conferences is optional, not required, yet 33% of the students chose to submit to conferences and all who submitted a paper were accepted. We believe this is strong anecdotal evidence for the quality of education in the program, especially in the learning objectives related to writing and research methods.

   

  2) With whom did you share the results of the year’s assessment efforts?

   

  • Results of our assessment report will be shared with department faculty, the dean, provost and the office of      institutional effectiveness. The report will be available online through the assessment website. When our newly formed department advisory committee meets, we will share results of this assessment with the advisory committee.

   

  3) Based on your program’s assessment findings, what subsequent action will your program take?

             

  • We graduated our first class in May 2013 and completed our first assessment of student learning outcomes in fall 2013. In subsequent years we will continue to implement the assessment plan outlined above. In the coming academic year we will gather data from the MPC courses on writing and speaking and will examine that data based on the course rubrics and our assessment criteria.

   

  • As we receive anecdotal data and feedback from students based on teaching evaluations and exit surveys, we continue to refine and improve courses in the program. For example, we are working to add new elective courses to strengthen our cognate areas. In 2013-14, we added electives in advanced organizational communication, web usability and conflict resolution and negotiation to give students more options and enhance their understanding of key cognate areas.  We have proposed a new course in communication theory that will serve to provide a stronger conceptual foundation before students take the research methods course. This course is moving through the curriculum approval process right now.  By pairing the two courses, it will be more practical for students to conduct a research project during their graduate coursework, while adhering to our instructional model of hybrid courses taught in eight-week blocks.

   

  The full report can be accessed at: MPC 2013 Annual Assessment Report

2019-2020

2014-2015