WASC 2005-04-13

Andrea, Josephine,

Areas that we can improve Caltech undergraduate education

• Quality of teaching
  • Feedback to faculty, including course evaluation (eg, how many hours do you spend)
  • Tools for faculty (best practices, new technology)
  • Orientation and mentoring for new teachers
  • Focus on what students learn?
  • Rewarding good teaching (incentives)

• Student workload issues
  • Underuniting
  • Homework, labs, exams, etc
  • Some classes are overunited
  • Possible things related to student health

• Overall undergraduate experience
  • Try to evaluate the quality of Caltech education (above just teaching)
  • Collect data about best practices in different divisions/options
  • Classroom experience (across the variety of courses that students teach)
  • 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
  • Might be a very tricky one

Discussion

• Very hard to change the core
• Zero in on a small number of things and do them really well
• Worried about results from the Princeton Review
  • Why do students feel this way
  • Can we figure out more to do about it
• Culture of going to classes can be obnoxious
  • Try to figure out why students aren't coming to class
  • Sometimes homework sets are due; causes problems with classes
• Issue of the core could be tricky
• Underuniting of courses
• Focus on the classroom experience; do students ask a lot of questions, is it a valuable learning experience
• Evenness of teaching quality
• Teacher training
• Incentives (salary, etc)
• Grade inflation?
• Gathering information for evaluation
  • Identify real problem areas
  • Salary incentives are probably not a great tool; rewards people who are doing well
• How do we incentivize good teaching/"punish" bad teaching
• How do we fit faculty to things they do well
• Student health