A Comparison of Student Interns and Supervisors regarding Internship Performance Ratings

Student media internships require three-way communication among education institutions, student interns, and workplace supervisors. This study assesses the extent to which interns and supervisors agree in ratings of intern performance. Self-administered questionnaires measured four skill sets that incorporated ACEJMC competencies and related communication abilities. Respondents differed in their respective mid- and final evaluations, becoming more congruent as internships progressed. Statistically significant differences were observed as students tended to rate their performances more highly than did their supervisors. Students increasingly realize that internships not only offer a means of testing their skills, but also provide valuable experience that can be highlighted on a resume. According to Gwin, the obvious benefit to employers is "a large corps of students who regard internships as a prize to be competed for, not merely a requirement to be endured."1 Cognizant of this, journalism and mass communication programs assist students in locating internship opportunities and many offer academic credit for their efforts. The U. S. -based accrediting association for journalism and mass communication's2 standards have affirmed the importance of translating formal classroom instruction into work-a- day professional knowledge and skills. In the early 1980s, it added internships to its standards, allowing programs to award academic credit for internships if students and employers evaluated the learning experience.3 Almost twenty-five years later, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) replaced its long-standing twelve accrediting standards with nine. The new standards retain and reinforce the importance of "intern- ship and other professional experi- ences outside the classroom," as well as the requirement for supervision and evaluation when academic credit is given.4 The accrediting association has not, however, determined the means or measures for evaluating internships. That task is assigned to the respective academic units, as is also true, according to Ceppos and Norton, of the more recent addition of assessment outcomes designed to evaluate "student learning at the course or unit level (as opposed to grading at the individual level)."5 Almost three decades of scholarly inquiry into the internship experience provides little insight into measures of supervisor and student evaluations of internships at the individual, course, or unit level. Yet these measures are important. Ceppos and Norton note that the internship experience offers a unique opportunity for students to work alongside professionals who, in turn, are further enabled to participate "in evaluating the teaching of professional practice... [and] to formulate educational standards."6 Inskster and Ross define an internship as "a three-way partnership among the educational institution, the student, and the organization where the interns take on the challenges of a program of systematic experiential learning."7 Real-world experiences accorded by internships thus require three-way communication among the educational institution, the student interns, and the business/industry worksite supervisors. However, there is a lack of reliable instruments with which to assess the quality of internships and the relative importance of various predictors in assuring successful internships and their tripartite benefits. The majority of journal articles dealing with internships, while indicating that both practitioners and academics generally agree such programs are a valuable component of the curriculum, devote little attention to the mechanics of operating an internship program and assessing learning outcomes. This study assesses the educational institution's two partners to determine how they rated the internship performance based on students' (1) general abilities and skills in the workplace, (2) specific job-related skills, (3) interpersonal communication skills, and (4) general professional conduct. …