General Education Report 2006-07

              PSF 29/07-08     

 

GENERAL EDUCATION REPORT:  2006-07

The membership of the General Education Committee for 2006-07 was as follows:  Lori Allen (Director), Erika Behling, Bob Canary, Suresh Chalasani, Donald Cress (Administrative Representative), Frances Kavenik (Chair), Zhaohui Li, Alex McNair, Kent McReynolds, Sue Norton (Academic Assessment),  Helen Rosenberg, Richard Walasek, Dean Yohnk; along with regular "guests" Mary Louise Edwards (FYE), Mary Power (Advising), Christine Tutlewski (Academic Skills).

The Committee met eight times (monthly) through the academic year, with subcommittees on Literacy, Critical Thinking, and Teamwork meeting at other times to establish assessment goals and protocols.

Beginning in January 2007, the Director's role was enhanced by the addition of duties and title as co-director of the First Year initiative (along with Student Affairs representative DeAnn Poessl).

On the national front, the Director wrote a proposal for the AAC&U Conference in Miami in February which was accepted as a roundtable session; presenters were Lori Allen, Frances Kavenik, James Robinson, and Jerry Greenfield.  The conference was also attended by Dana Oswald and Theresa Castor.

At the campus level, the director wrote a proposal to the Provost for a pilot project on curricular reform, focusing on adding literacy specialists to 100-level general education courses, which was funded.  This SSI (Student Success Initiative) project will begin immediately with sections of POLS 100 (American Government) and in January with GSCI 102 (Science and PseudoScience), wit control groups in place and using the Nelson Denny reading examinations to measure progress in reading skills over the course of the semester.  We found that unless writing is graded more substantially, students will not avail themselves of tutors.

The other subcommittees, on Teamwork and Critical Thinking, made some progress throughout the year, but also found a lack of systematic application and assessment of those goals in general education courses which had identified them as student outcomes.  The Teamwork group (Suresh Chalasani and Sue Norton) created a meta-rubric and contacted those teaching courses which had identified teamwork as a goal, and found uneven responses and little evaluation in place.  The Critical Thinking group (Helen Rosenberg, Alex McNair, and Don Cress) sent a survey to those teaching the 40 courses which had identified it as a goal, with little response.

Because of understaffing in the library, Information Literacy was postponed until 2007-08.

The Committee certified for fall 2007 five general sections of GNED 101, along with 2 sections targeted to pre-health majors (taught by Bryan Lewis) and 3 sections targeted to TRIO students (taught by Chris Zanowski), after receiving sample syllabi, goals, and rubrics for those courses.  The Committee continued to consider whether or not to remove this number and those courses from the auspices of the program.

We also certified Kristen Holmberg-Wright's (l credit) course on "Personal Empowerment" as GNED 290.

We certified 4 sections of GNED 290 as "Diversity Circles" for Spring 2007 for the last time, urging Roseann Mason to seek another home for this valuable course.

We sent teams to several conferences this year:

              AAC&U, Miami in March: presented a roundtable session on GENED reform (Jerry, Lori, Jim, FMK, with Theresa and Dana)

              OPID Conference in March, presentation on literacy with Lori, FMK, and Theron

              First Year Experience conference in Dallas in March, attended by Lori, Frances, and ?

We conducted several Brown Bag sessions throughout the year, on Information Literacy, Critical Thinking/Teamwork, Reading/Writing Across the Curriculum.

We endorsed Fay Akindes in her pursuit of a proposal on "Infusing Diversity Throughout the General Education Curriculum," which was funded as a summer institute (2007) by OPID and resulted in revision of numerous general education courses.

A grant on reading interventions was proposed to OPID and funded for 2007-08.

Rhonda Kimmel, the Registrar, visited the Committee several times with issues related to DARS and general education.

Discussion continued throughout the semester on defining the three distribution areas and reviewing existing courses on a 6-year cycle.

We discussed the fact that the Admissions homepage is not useful for General Education, and that we would be better served by a GenEd page.

We asked the Administration to rethink the combined GenEd director/co-director of First Year Experience position, which we feel is unworkable and dilutes the GE director's focus on general education matters.

 

                                                                                    Submitted December 2007

Frances M. Kavenik (chair)