Reading Internship Evaluations Across Liberal Arts Programs: A Comparative Qualitative Case Study

Abstract

Internships have become a central feature of undergraduate education, yet the evaluative documents produced at their close remain under-examined as data in their own right. This qualitative comparative case study analyses the site supervisor narratives written on internship evaluation forms across three liberal arts degree programs at a single Philippine higher education institution: the Bachelor of Science in Psychology (BSP), the Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (ABPOLSCI), and the Bachelor of Arts in Communication (BACOMM). The unit of analysis is the individual supervisor narrative entry, a single free-text evaluative comment written by one site supervisor about one intern. A total of 230 narrative entries (BSP, n = 100; ABPOLSCI, n = 70; BACOMM, n = 60), extracted from completed internship evaluation forms across five academic years, were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis within and across cases to examine what supervisors foreground when they write about emerging practitioners. Findings reveal a thin shared vocabulary of generic employability themes, such as work ethic, willingness to learn, team collaboration, and communication, beneath which three distinct evaluative registers operate: an ethical–dispositional register in BSP, an institutional–trajectorial register in ABPOLSCI, and a creative–portfolio register in BACOMM. Extending Shulman’s concept of signature pedagogies, the study proposes that professions possess signature assessments: discipline-specific evaluative genres through which fields articulate competent practice. The findings caution against standardized evaluation templates and support discipline-sensitive designs that preserve narrative specificity while identifying legitimate bases for cross-program comparability.