Keywords

experiential learning, experiential education, internship, syllabus, syllabi, evaluation, formative evaluation, internship policy

Description

ABSTRACT

Annually, approximately 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students participate in the 133 academic internship courses offered at BYU. Each course is required to comply with the university Internship Policy. The university Internship Policy provides guidelines of how internship courses operate, responsibilities of the intern, site supervisor, and faculty advisor, and how students earn academic credit for internships. Compliance with these guidelines is supposed to be monitored by the Internship Office; however, due to personnel and time constraints, the degree to which the courses comply with that policy had not been studied prior to this evaluation. This project evaluated the syllabi of the 133 academic internship courses for compliance with the university Internship Policy. Of the 133 courses, 32 did not submit a syllabus for review. Most of the remaining 101 courses were at least partly compliant with the policy. Courses that were not fully compliant were generally missing one or more of the following requirements: a pre-internship orientation, an assessment of internship providers, a grading scale, the point values of the assignments, and/or the course’s learning outcomes. Nearly all courses met the requirement of having assignments that were composed of texts/readings, papers/reports, research/projects, or demonstrations/presentations. The results of this evaluation were shared with the department internship coordinators so that they might improve their syllabi prior to the next evaluation cycle beginning in Fall semester 2017. Keywords: