These classes generally earn the participating students one semester of credit. Topics for transition courses mainly consist of students' transition issues, and students enrolled in them are likely to engage in job search and life transition planning. Discussions center around self-assessment, financial planning, the job search and the first year on the job, relationships, and diversity.
Presentations weigh heavily in evaluation of performance in these courses, but rather than major projects, students often develop a portfolio or use the career center.
Career-planning courses. Career-planning courses assist students as they engage in pre-professional development. In some cases career planning is the only goal of these courses. In the First National Survey of Senior Seminars and Capstone Courses, these courses were the least frequently reported major type. Career planning courses are likely to be taught by career-center professionals, but in some cases academic faculty might teach them.
Although students typically receive grades for these courses, they are less likely to receive as many credit hours as students enrolled in other types of senior seminars or capstone courses.
The classroom experience in these courses is evaluated most often by the creation of a portfolio, followed by a major project and a presentation. There are also a small number of senior seminars and capstone courses that do not fit in these four types. These courses often span curricular and cocurricular boundaries and attempt to address institutional goals.
These courses do share many of the characteristics of other courses. The primary goals fostering integration and synthesis within the academic major and promoting integration and connections between the academic major and world of work are similar to those of most types of the other senior courses. These courses do not generally focus on general education, and are almost always taught by a member of the academic faculty. They tend to be the smallest of the senior courses, often enrolling fewer than nine students.
They are most often held for one academic term and students are usually assigned a letter grade. As is true with many trends in higher education, senior seminars and capstone courses will likely continue to appear and disappear in various forms. Instructional technologies and the changing delivery of student services will affect the content and character of these courses in the future.
This, along with changing student demographics and needs of the institutions offering them, will determine the future goals and structure of these courses. John N. Gardner, Gretchen Van der Veer, and Associates. But many students must complete one final thing before walking that stage: the capstone course. A capstone course can have a variety of names, depending on where you go to school.
A capstone might be called a culmination project, senior thesis, or a final exhibition. Capstone courses vary in form depending on your major. A capstone course is not always a paper, though a paper is often a piece of it. Art students may put on exhibitions of their work, while other students will have to pass an oral examination, defend their thesis to a group of professors, or complete a book. Most students spend an entire semester putting together their capstone and completing the necessary research.
It sounds like a lot of work. Do you have any other questions about capstones? Is there another way you would rather complete a culminating experience? It helps validate students as learners. Depending upon the major and course requirements, there may be opportunities to match students with outside contacts, not only to assist with the capstone project research and problem statement, but to also provide a networking community.
A capstone is similar to a thesis in that the starting point involves strengths that one needs for a thesis or dissertation work. A student needs to think about the skeletal structure of research and form their theory, hypothesis, and problem statement. A capstone paper may be 25 pages, where a thesis could be or more, and is a more demanding research paper.
If an undergraduate student chooses to further their education and enter into a doctoral program, the capstone project could be an invaluable tool in preparing for a thesis. According to Czarnec, capstones of all programs are leading students to the end game. The goal is to develop well-rounded thinkers who can pull their work together in a coherent, articulate, well-organized fashion, while considering the demands of the profession or vocation in which they are interested.
The focus and intent of a capstone should be to create an effective device to assess and measure all that the students have learned throughout their program in an aggregate fashion so they can demonstrate their life-long vocational skills in a nice, neat package. According to MacCarty, capstone courses should be structured to support student success in fulfilling program requirements and allow them the opportunity to showcase their academic abilities and skills gained throughout their degree program.
Laurie Smith '14 is a writer, editor and communications specialist. Connect with her on LinkedIn. In today's competitive workforce, it can pay - literally - to advance from an associate to bachelor's degree.
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