Chapter 5
Academic Programs

 

5.3 The General Education Program

As stated in the SVSU catalog,

General Education refers to that part of a student’s education that contributes to the breadth of knowledge needed to be a more effective citizen of a complex and culturally diverse world. It supports the student with the skills and perspectives that will not always be gained from a specialized program of study and provides a basis for a common educational experience all students and graduates of the University can share. It is intended to help each student become more broadly knowledgeable, adaptable, and capable in their many life roles. By graduation, students will have been given opportunities to develop their insight, creativity and intellectual curiosity, as well as analytical and critical skills. The General Education Program is designed to develop in each student:

The SVSU General Education Program, newly revised and in its third year, crosses college lines and is administered by a contractually defined committee of elected faculty members and administrative appointees. The revision was carried out in response to an extensive assessment of the old program and concerns raised in the 1994 NCA evaluation team report. The process involved faculty across the institution as well as administration. This revised program is structured into ten content categories with program goals—critical thinking, logical reasoning and effective communication—derived from the mission for General Education (above). As described in Chapter 3, a governance structure was developed and put in place and assessment protocols established. The General Education Committee (GEC) has become one of the major governance committees of the institution, defined by the faculty contract, along with the Curriculum and Academic Policies Committee (undergraduate curriculum), Graduate Committee (graduate curriculum), and Professional Practices Committee (tenure, promotion, and discipline).

Program History

Like other colleges and universities in the United States, SVSU had envisioned General Education as a set of various content area requirements to give students experience in a number of disciplines and to serve those disciplines by providing students for introductory courses. Over time this conception had progressed into a 39-credit hour requirement spread across nine content categories: Literature, Arts, Numerical Understanding, Natural Sciences, Historical and Philosophical Ideas, Social Science Methodologies, Social Institutions, Communication, and International Perspectives.

Although new courses were introduced in General Education categories, there was no oversight body other than the Curriculum and Academic Policies Committee; no statement of objectives for the program (though individual categories did have objectives); no standard review and/or expiration policies for GE courses; no clearly articulated criteria for the various categories; and no provision for ongoing assessment. Further, there were no regular institutional procedures in place to remove courses that were not serving the goals of GE, short of the department in question requesting to remove the course. For the most part, this did not occur, leading to an accumulation of more than 260 different courses in the program.

In 1994, NCA evaluators who critiqued the SVSU GE program echoed concerns already voiced on campus: that General Education at SVSU needed sweeping reform. This led the faculty to articulate a rationale for General Education focusing on critical thinking, logical reasoning, and affective learning, along with written and oral communication skills. The intent to revise the General Education program to be consistent with the new rationale and to put in place governing and assessment structures was submitted to HLC/NCA as a monitoring report in June 1995.

Conclusions from Two Years of General Education Assessment

To further the process, the faculty placed a moratorium on new classes being added until the program could be assessed in terms of this new rationale. Teams of faculty members evaluated students in the areas of critical thinking, logical reasoning, and affective learning.

That two year assessment revealed that significant numbers of students at all levels

Faculty members expressed further concern that abilities in the three defined areas of General Education were not seen by students as important. A number of students expressed irritation that the kinds of exercises represented by the assessment activities were off-task and irrelevant to classroom work. They viewed learning as confined to information acquisition. (This perception has also been affirmed by CIRP surveys described in Chapter 1.)

SVSU also discovered that students actually took a limited subset of courses to meet General Education requirements. Many departments that had seen the proliferation of courses as a way of ensuring enrollments for their programs realized that this was not the case, which relieved some of the apprehension about program reform.

Building from the results of this initial assessment, SVSU embarked upon a major General Education reform project requiring extensive strategic planning and consensus building among the faculty. An ad hoc committee composed primarily of faculty members developed a proposal for a new program that eliminated content categories and, in their place, created categories centered on aptitude development and a basic goal statement: that General Education should help students learn to think critically, reason logically, and communicate effectively. The proposal also removed all courses from the program and created a contractually recognized oversight body to evaluate courses submitted to the new program. This first reform proposal was defeated by a narrow vote of the full University faculty.

After listening closely to various voices in the debate, a reconfigured group submitted a second proposal the following semester. Although this version maintained content categories (albeit in a revised form), it incorporated several large-scale reform elements. The new proposal:

The new program was unanimously approved by the full University faculty and administration in March 2000. The Faculty Association and the Administration then negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding that clarified procedural matters relevant to General Education, especially the formation of the General Education Committee (GEC).