This chapter examines the language colleges and universities use to represent required undergraduate capstone experiences. How do institutions frame capstones, and what do these frames tell us about the goals of culminating experiences and the drivers of institutional change?

In “Making the Case for Capstones and Signature Work,” Nancy Budwig and Amy Jessen-Marshall lay out various theoretical frameworks for culminating experiences, from workplace preparation to effective citizenship to student learning. But how do institutions make use of these frames in practice? More specifically, how do institutions that are fully committed to capstones—those that require them of all undergraduate students—represent this high-impact experience?

To answer these questions, the chapter authors conducted a systematic review of 481 colleges and universities in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Based on their public-facing documents (e.g., programs of study, course catalogs, and undergraduate bulletins), fifty-five of these institutions require a capstone for all baccalaureate degrees, representing 4% of UK, 5% of Australian, and 15% of US institutions.

For these 55 institutions, the authors analyzed descriptions of required capstones to identify prominent themes—integration, communication, critical thinking, connection to future goals, application, etc. These themes provide insight into how institutions define capstones, what they hope students learn from them, and the complex forces that motivate institutions to embrace this labor-intensive practice.

This chapter tells the story of how a capstone course for fourth-year students was adopted and adapted into four courses across three institutions and various disciplines, with plans now to bring it to a fourth university. Each course leader highlights adaptations made based on discipline and institution, and offers lessons learned about encouraging enrollment, bringing colleagues on board, connecting to the broader community, and making sure each course outlives its initial champions.

Founded on the work of the Senior Year Experience work at National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, the courses varied in their readings and focus but all had as their goals the integration of students’ degree learning and an intentional transition from university to the rest of life. An Action Project and Skills Portfolio are major components of the course and were adapted to fit the discipline of English Literature and expanded as a capstone requirement for the Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture program. It was further adapted to the University of New Brunswick Saint John context, where faculty highlights aspects of reflection and transitioning, included an ePortfolio, and invited a range of alumni to talk about their learning and employment experiences.

With each iteration, instructors have shifted the readings and focus depending on the discipline but have adhered to the connection between that discipline and the world beyond campus walls. The Skills Portfolio has been adapted to changes in job search expectations, moving from mainly paper to mainly online portfolios. But two basic principles persist: students look back at their degrees by using the tools those degrees have taught them; and they look forward to their post-degree lives with an adaptable portfolio that helps them articulate their skills, knowledge, and attributes.

This chapter describes a quality assurance system of collaborative sharing across multiple institutions in Australia and explores, through participant reflections, how such practice can help promote staff confidence and improve facilitation of capstone tasks in the tertiary setting resulting in benefits that derive from a multi-institution approach. A project team consisting of peers from similar disciplines across several institutions in Australia worked together on the project funded by the Australian Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT). Their work verified student attainment standards in the revised national Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) (2015) using capstone tasks in coursework at their given institutions. The External Referencing of Standards (ERoS) project was a collaboration between four universities each located in different States: University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Victoria, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Queensland and Curtin University in Western Australia. This chapter describes the ERoS project, the objectives, and outputs so that other institutions can adapt and employ similar models to ensure quality assessment in their capstone tasks and beyond.

This chapter shares results from a mixed-method, multi-institutional study gauging the type of faculty who teach capstone experiences, their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and the type of support they receive at their institutions. Henscheid (2000) found that almost half of 707 regionally accredited colleges and universities use capstones as part of their institution’s assessment program and the 2010-2011 HERI Faculty Survey indicated that 35.8% of respondents had taught a Capstone course. The 2016–2017 HERI Faculty Survey indicated that just half of undergraduate teaching faculty participated in teaching-related professional development opportunities and that a majority of faculty surveyed (69.2%) agree that there is adequate support for faculty development. The results shared in this chapter paint a different picture of faculty desire for resources and support in teaching capstone experiences. In a survey of 138 faculty, less than half found the availability of resources “good” or “excellent,” with 14% of those surveyed saying that resources were not even available to them. It is vital that faculty members preparing to develop and teach capstone experiences have access to the resources they need to help them be successful. To that end, this chapter provides a common support needs checklist; a set of heuristics that help faculty identify what resources may be most helpful for them at the particular moment and guided by the tensions/pressures/motivations they experience in their particular context; and a how to guide to structure a significant conversation.

This chapter provides a holistic, high-level overview of the global capstone landscape by reviewing a sampling of institutional objectives, faculty goals, and student perceptions of the outcomes of capstone. The chapter provides an inventory of capstone purposes presented in the framework of “what could a capstone be?” These purposes are gleaned from institutional documents, faculty perceptions of capstones, and student perceptions of capstone purposes.

Discussion centers around institutional decisions about capstones, such as disciplinary vs non-disciplinary, required vs elective, etc. and includes commentary on the drivers or influences on capstone purposes such as institutional, disciplinary, or accrediting body requirements. Next, the chapter includes case studies of exemplars of capstone courses.

Traditionally in the biosciences, students have undertaken laboratory-based, fieldwork, or literature review capstones. However, less than ten percent of bioscience graduates go onto careers in scientific research; the overwhelming majority leave science altogether. Traditional bioscience capstones do not provide the requisite work experience or skills development for the diverse range of career paths followed by the majority of our graduates. There is a need to provide capstone opportunities that better prepare our students for the 21st Century workplace, a focus on providing the requisite work experience or skills development for the diverse range of career paths followed by the majority of our graduates.

This chapter details the 20-year journey of taking a discipline specific capstone course and evolving it into a course with a focus on personal and professional development, and preparation for the workplace, giving students the opportunity to select from 15 different formats of capstone. This design enables students to decide what they want to achieve personally and professionally from their capstone, creating a safe space to try out different career opportunities, and choose accordingly. The chapter functions as a comprehensive source of information for colleagues, irrespective of discipline, seeking to broaden the range of capstones available to their students, or those seeking to create capstone opportunities giving students greater ownership of their educational experiences and of their personal and professional development.

This chapter argues that fostering inclusive and transformative capstone experiences requires understanding the interplay of various identities and social positions in the learning context. Diversity is generally viewed as a characteristic of the student body or a state to be pursued, camouflaging the fact that social identities are a set of power relationships that both structure social interaction, such as capstone experiences, and that are themselves restructured through social interaction. This notion is explored in relation to both student and faculty identities recognizing that faculty identities are often subsumed by their institutional role and/or the presumption that their academic training has socialized them to the milieu. Through embedded qualitative research at five English-language universities in high-income countries, we identified moments and processes where diversity, identity, and inclusion are (re)negotiated through social interactions as a strategy for our research to find “openings” where hegemonic power can be disrupted in favor of inclusive excellence. Authors conceive capstone experiences as a “project of becoming” for those involved. As the culminating experience, the capstone represents both the pinnacle of and also the cusp of transition beyond students’ university career. From these findings, salient and hidden aspects of diversity and identity are identified that affect capstones and offer a set of curricular tools to improve capstone quality through more inclusive approaches to teaching.

The Bard Early College Network includes ten schools that, through dual-enrollment courses taught by faculty with terminal degrees, allow students to graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree simultaneously, tuition free. In their third and fourth years on a Bard Early College campus, students enroll in the Bard Seminar Sequence, a four-semester sequence of interdisciplinary courses that emphasize close reading, critical inquiry, and scholarly writing. During their fourth and final semester of Seminar, students complete a capstone project that culminates in a ten-page research-based essay and presentation. The Seminar capstone project serves two primary functions: it highlights and reinforces the academic skills that students have developed over several years, and it prepares them for the increasingly independent work that will be asked of them as they pursue bachelor’s degrees and careers. Students across the Bard Early College Network come from a multitude of educational backgrounds and bring a wide variety of interests and ambitions to the Seminar classroom.

While the BHSEC campuses are unique in that they employ a traditional college faculty in a public high school setting, the writing-as-a-process elements of the capstone research project would look familiar to instructors of first-year writing at any college or university. The thorniest capstone-related issues faced at the BHSECs, which include an academically diverse student body and the coordination of instructors from multiple departments located in multiple cities, makes this chapter especially relevant to institutions facing similar challenges.

Hostos Community College created a multidisciplinary faculty development course-redesign seminar to craft capstone learning experiences rooted in varied faculty identities and dissimilar pedagogical expertise. We prioritized creating a safe, interdisciplinary, and collaborative environment that was rich with brainstorming, mentoring, and constructive feedback. Eight individual seminars ran for 15 weeks each involving groups of seven or less faculty between 2015 and 2019. Thirty-five faculty participated in redesigning twenty-two courses, using one of two models. This chapter focuses on the first model, a traditional model of individual faculty designing capstone assignments for specific courses in a structured workshop with bi-weekly meetings. The workshop involved developing the assignment, adjusting curriculum, teaching the course, and assessing the delivery and outcomes. This chapter provides a close look at the administrative structures designed to support faculty.

This chapter foregrounds a distinguishing feature embedded in the capstones designed at a diverse mix of colleges and universities: namely, a civic dimension. There is a great potential in capstones that are intentionally designed to foster democratic learning, civic agency, and public problem solving. The authors report results from a multi-year project demonstrating how various disciplines can share specific design features, including scaffolding learning experiences, that culminate in a civic capstone.

Two case studies—a Global Studies Capstone at Providence College and a Communication and Media Capstone at Willamette University—and models from public universities offer lessons for cultivating capstones and provide examples of “what works” to engage students in civic capstones. Through this multi-institutional perspective, the authors show how capstones in a variety of disciplines and institutions can develop civic competencies through collaborative learning, reflective practice, and publicly engaged research. They also outline the importance of engaging, deliberative pedagogy for educating future leaders in communities share and concrete assignments developed over years of practice.

Based on this scan and intensive experience with capstones, the authors introduce the concept of “civic professionalism,” which is a framework for incorporating civic engagement into capstones across various disciplines and essential for connecting capstone courses to broader institutional transformation. Capstone courses are ideal bridges between students, alumni, and community partners, and re-thinking professional identity is an important component of these courses. Ultimately, the core consequence of the design of civic capstones is their power to hone students’ skills in the habits of democratic engagement across differences, making questions of diversity, equity, and agency central. This power extends the impact of disciplinary capstones, increasing student learning in the discipline, while also giving students first-hand experience transforming knowledge into action to contribute to a more just and equitable society.

In a sample of institutions from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, only 9.1% of institutions with universally required capstone experiences approached the capstone from a general education or core curriculum approach. The other 91.0% were either exclusively disciplinary or combined disciplinary knowledge with more general learning across various disciplines. This chapter provides a case study analysis of a universally required general education capstone at University of Buffalo in the United States.

This particular capstone requirement is unique because it is part of the general education program (not a disciplinary capstone) and implemented at a large, research-intensive public institution where a program of such scale is typically not expected. In addition, the signature work product is an integrative portfolio based on general education coursework. Drawing on document analysis and interviews, this chapter describes the context of the institution, the structure of the capstone experience, the drivers for and conception of this program, the detailed goals of this capstone experience, and the benefits and challenges of this general education capstone course.

This chapter describes the evolution of the capstone requirement at the two Australian universities, which require all students to undertake a capstone experience in their undergraduate degree. Institutional leaders with knowledge of history and practice of capstones within each of the two Australian institutions committed to capstones were interviewed. Both universities are Melbourne-based: the top-ranked, Group of Eight (sandstone) University of Melbourne and the lower-ranked, innovative research-oriented La Trobe University. Our prompt was: “Tell me the story of capstones at your institution.”

Results explore why and how these institutions developed a strong commitment to capstones in curriculum. In this way, the chapter aims to deepen our understanding of how institutions manage the change process for introducing and sustaining capstones. Overall, these stories reveal the complex forces driving capstone change, implementation and perceived success. The insights provided offer lessons for whole-of-institution capstone design, implementation and maintenance.

For institutions of higher education and the professionals that work in them, the senior year represents the final opportunity to prepare seniors to face the demands that lie ahead. Therefore, if institutions wish to capitalize on the opportunities and obligations to provide meaningful culminating experiences through senior capstones, their design and execution must be intentionally and integrally connected to undergraduate education. Interested stakeholders at colleges and universities are likely to find a multiplicity of forms diffused throughout their organizations, making this task fraught with challenges.

This chapter, based on the National Survey of Senior Capstone Experiences, highlights the various forms that capstone experiences takes on campuses across the United States. Then the chapter interrogates the national landscape, highlighting institutional concerns for the senior year.