Balsam and Reuter, Externship Assessment Project: An Empirical Study of Supervisor Evaluations of Extern Work Performance
From Professors Jodi S. Balsam & Margaret Reuter, their exciting, useful new paper:
The paper tells the story of a year’s worth of field supervisor evaluations of student externs to extract insights about the extern experience, especially regarding the variety, complexity, and responsibility levels of their work. Using qualitative data analysis, we distilled the supervisor narratives in a comprehensive, uniform, and disciplined matter. We overlaid those narratives with student demographic data to understand variations along class year, GPA, gender, and race. The evaluations revealed that educational opportunities varied among different field placement settings and practice areas, in expected and some unexpected ways. Our analysis seeks to describe extern performance and learning in a clear-eyed fashion and offer guidance for externship program design and assessment of programmatic and institutional learning outcomes.