WASC Proposal

This is a draft of the proposal that will be sent to David Goodstein for inclusion in the overall WASC proposal from Caltech. Our part should be between 2 and 3 pages. This text can be editted by logging on to the wiki and clicking the edit button.

Undergraduate Education

Andrea Dubin, Marianne Bronner-Fraser, Jean Ensminger, Csilla Felsen,
Brad Filippone, Nate Lewis, Richard Murray, Niles Pierce, Josephine Suh

Overview of Caltech Undergraduate Educational Program

• Overview of the Caltech undergraduate program (mainly pulled from catalog)
• Focus on what is required to understand the issues described in the next section
• This section will be written after the proposed areas of study are hashed out; it should be 0.5-1 pages long

Issues for Further Study

Based on consultation with faculty, students and staff, we have identified two specific areas where we feel that a thorough assessment of Caltech's educational program would be timely and could lead to constructive changes in the undergraduate program.

Teaching Quality

While there are many excellent teachers at Caltech, there are also examples of courses that are poorly taught and instructors who could do a much better job in their teaching performance. At the present time, there are relatively few resources available for Caltech faculty who want to improve their teaching and limited feedback mechanisms for improving the teaching effectiveness. In our initial discussions, we have identified several aspects of teaching quality that we believe should be further studied:

Course Feedback - how do faculty get feedback on their courses, but during the term and after the term? Could course surveys, web-sites and other mechanisms be used to provide instructors more information about whether the class is understanding the material and whether the teaching methods are effective?

Best Practices - are there faculty who would be willing to share their techniques for effective teaching? How could these be made available to other faculty? Can new technology be prototyped in selected courses and evaluated for use by teachers around the campus?

Teaching Orientation - how can Caltech best provide information to new teachers about resources that are available to them, techniques for effective teaching, and integration of the honor system into their courses?

Faculty Incentives - are their incentives that can be provided that increase the level and uniformity of teaching across the campus? What can be done to help improve the teaching of Caltech faculty who are currently not effective in the classroom or laboratory?

Benchmarking - how are other schools approaching these issues? What might Caltech incorporate that is working well in other places?

Undergraduate Workload

Another common area of concern at Caltech is the workload of the undergraduates. On the one hand, many Caltech courses are notorious for requiring more work than the number of units would indicate. At the same time, some Caltech undergraduates take a large number of units each term, creating a situation in which they have little time to integrate the material they are learning or pursue activities outside of class (including research opportunities at Caltech). Some possible aspects for further study are:

Course Underuniting - how can the number of units required for a course be accurately determined and assigned to each course? Will students be able to finish their graduation requirements if the units are increased appropriately?

Course Timing - the timing of homework, labs, exams and courses can often lead to situations in which students must choose between completing their work and attending classes and labs. Can methods for resolving these timing conflicts be identified and implemented?

Class Attendance - in some courses, the attendance in class is lower than 50%. Are there reasons for this lack of attendance and should lectures be restructured to encourage greater attendance?

Core Evaluation - is the core curriculum providing the information required for later courses? If we look at the students that are graduating from Caltech, does the core provide the background that they need?

Independent Study - is the structure of the Caltech undergraduate education one that allows "inspired independent study" for those students who are interested? How might research opportunities be better integrated into the curriculum requirements. (This topic overlaps with the Undergraduate Research self-study topic.)

Student Advising

• This came up in the CCSC meeting and there was a lot of resonance with looking into this.

Other Issues

In addition to these broad issues, there are a number of more specific items that we would like to collect information about and consider as possible components of the self study on undergraduate education:

• Classroom experience (across the variety of courses that students take)
• Might touch on tools (eg, MATLAB), breadth of the core
• Look into student health? Compare to other universities
• Perhaps link to research and honor system topics
• Course attendance, classroom experience and *learning*
• Can we find out why students aren't coming to class?
• Focus on what students learn?
• Content of the core

Proposed Approach

Collect information through survey data, polling people on campus (both faculty and students). Present the data to faculty and students to generate more discussion and come up with solutions. Have committee on Undergraduate Education in the upcoming Student Faculty Conference to make this a more broad Caltech campus discussion.

Course surveys

Class surveys - freshmen and seniors

Requirements analysis