From: Joey Horsley & Colin Godfrey, Chairs, CAS Core Curriculum Committee

To: Michael Greeley, CoChair CAS Senate

CC: Alan Harwood, Core Director

Subject: Report of the 1997/98 CAS Core Curriculum Committee

During the year 1997/98 the Core Curriculum Committee reviewed twenty sections given in the Collegiate Seminar Program. These were sections of C110, C120, C130, C140, and C150 courses, some given for the first time.

Our summary comment is that the courses offered students a rich and varied experience, which most students appreciated, stemming from impressive efforts on the part of the instructors. In our review of the courses we examined syllabi, assignments and other teaching materials, grade sheets, instructors comments, and student evaluations.

The student evaluations included the traditional written comments and also an op scan section for rating characteristics the committee was interested in. This computerized op scan section was developed by the committee last year and was first used in Spring 1997. The committee found all this material useful and revealing, but believed that time would not allow a similarly detailed review for every section in a greatly expanded General Education Curriculum.

Overall, the teaching evaluations have indicated that students find the Seminars interesting, often exciting, and are enthusiastic about their instructors. In general students believe that their writing, critical reading and thinking skills have improved through their work in the seminars. The syllabi, assignments and materials reflect creative and often extremely dedicated and thoughtful efforts on the part of instructors to meet the goals of the Seminars. Instructors' comments bring both strengths and challenges of the Seminars to light and to some extent echo student comments. We shall comment below on some of the issues raised in our reviews.

Students and advising
The wide disparity of skill level, preparation and interest among students in a given course posed significant difficulties. Though this is a virtually universal problem at UMB, it was the one issue that many instructors found caused them the most difficulty in teaching their seminars. Suggested responses to the disparity problem are:

• Make a serious effort to define criteria for enrollment in particular courses and screen and advise students accordingly. We suggest a waiver possibility for incoming freshmen with advanced capabilities and background; instead of requiring them to take the First Year Experience they could be asked to take two sections of Sophomore-Junior inquiry courses.

• Iron out glitches in the course schedule booklet and be sure that course titles and seminar descriptions are accurate, complete and made available to students during the course selection process. In some cases students found themselves in courses they had not selected, or whose content was substantially different from what they had expected from the title, resulting in resentment or lack of interest.

Writing
Instructors generally felt a need for more help in improving student writing overall. Additional seminar sessions, workshops and handouts might be useful. Improvement of writing is a major goal of the collegiate seminars. Some points to consider about writing are:

• Instructors felt a need for some coordination with or at least information about how writing is being taught in Freshman English and other writing courses.

• Some instructors provided the students in advance with checklists of criteria upon which papers would be evaluated. A similar sheet was then used and returned with the paper and instructor's comments. Individual conferences were held with students about papers.

• The Committee suggests using the "Nine Elements of Proficiency" as a teaching tool and possibly as a topic for a faculty seminar on teaching writing in the Core.

• It was not clear what to do about issues of grammar.

Oral expression
The Committee recognizes the importance of developing oral presentation skills in our undergraduates. However, this capability has seemed the most difficult for many instructors to teach effectively, and faculty would benefit from handouts or workshops giving guidance, with models for successful exercises, and techniques for improving the quality of presentations, for involving the entire class, and for assessing performance.

Small group work
Faculty may need additional help in using groups effectively, making groups accountable for their work, etc. Again, workshops for sharing experiences or handouts with guidelines and model exercises would be helpful. As suggested by one instructor, clear definition of group tasks seems essential.

Course design, content
Instructors invariably find that originally planned coverage of content needs to be reduced if mandated skills work is to be attended to. While some tradeoff of this sort is necessary, content coverage should not be sacrificed to the point of weakening student interest in the course. And content and course design should have student interest as a high priority.

Core Guidelines and Capabilities
In spite of carefully designed and reviewed course syllabi, instructors found the expectations in terms of capabilities guidelines unrealistic, with just too many goals for one semester. In particular, some instructors found it of doubtful value to try to schedule oral reports into already crowded agenda. More thought needs to be given to prioritizing skills goals for a particular seminar. In a number of areas, it might be useful to provide instructors with more assistance, in the form of workshops or handouts with suggested techniques targeting particular skills areas. We recognize that this kind of support has already been offered in seminars for faculty teaching in the Collegiate Seminars, but the need will continue, especially as new faculty are recruited for the new first and second-year courses, and the capabilities guidelines and standards prepared for these courses are a good step in this direction.

Pedagogy (miscellaneous)
Required individual conferences with students were found by some instructors to be the most valuable exercise of the course. They were useful for identifying students' academic and non-academic needs and problems; for giving feedback on writing; for learning how the course is coming across. Conferences should perhaps be more formally encouraged among Collegiate Seminars generally. Careful preparation and provision of study guides, exercise sheets, etc for reading and discussion assignments were found by many instructors to be important keys to success.

Attrition
In some sections of the seminars the attrition was very high, in others very low. It might be worth investigating possible variables to see whether anything useful could be learned concerning retention in these courses. It was not clear to the committee whether there was a pattern here.

Assessment of Seminars
Use of midsemester evaluations and individual conferences during the semester proved helpful for midcourse corrections. Exit interviews were used by one instructor to learn more about what worked and what didn't in students' experience of the course. Other instructors discussed the course with the class as a whole at the end of the semester to get their comments and suggestions.

Transition to the new Gen Ed plan
While some CAS Collegiate Seminar faculty are planning to revise their courses as FYE or Sophomore Inquiry courses, others have not yet taken steps in this direction. Clarification is needed as to whether (and how) the present CAS Seminar Program and its 5 rubrics will survive independently apart from the new General Education First and Second Year Seminars. This is an important issue, given the tremendous effort that faculty have put into the development of the current Seminars.

Go back to the Core Curriculum Committee page.

Go back to the CSM Senate main page.