FAYETTEVILLE -- Faculty at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville have begun taking a hard look at general education requirements that apply to all students seeking a bachelor's degree.
"Do we want to do something more innovative than what we are doing right now?" said David Jolliffe, a UA English professor.
Two meetings this month focused on UA's core curriculum.
In the current discussion, "we are not proposing any expansion of the core or reduction of the core," said Jolliffe, chairman of the university's General Education Core Curriculum Committee.
He said the goal in considering a change is to better engage students, perhaps by doing more to thematically link courses that satisfy core requirements to one another.
"I think that would do nothing but improve our graduation and retention rate," Jolliffe said.
At the meetings, examples from other schools were presented, Jolliffe said, such as changes made last year at Virginia Tech University. The school is creating interdisciplinary minors that help students satisfy general education requirements. Proposed minors at Virginia Tech include such topics as innovation and sustainability.
In the 1980s, at the urging of then-Gov. Bill Clinton, Arkansas lawmakers approved a minimum core at state-supported universities.
In addition to requirements imposed by specific academic departments, students attending a public university now must complete a 35-semester-hour core that fulfills requirements in five areas: English/communication, mathematics, science, fine arts/humanities and social science.
UA lists several courses that students can take to satisfy each of these requirements. Students at UA need a minimum of 120 credit hours to graduate.
"The state minimum core is locked in place," Jolliffe said, adding that he wasn't sure what approvals might be required to change how UA's core courses might be linked to one another. The university's faculty senate would be involved, he said.
At one time, UA's J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences imposed additional requirements.
But in 2010 faculty voted to reduce the college's core to 35 semester hours from 66 semester hours.
A semester hour is a unit based on the amount of class instruction and work required from students.
The 2010 change at the Fayetteville campus came after a state law passed in 2009 prohibited four-year public schools from imposing certain requirements on transfer students with an associate degree. The law stated that universities could not require those students to take "general education lower division" courses.
Josipa Roksa, a University of Virginia sociologist, said more colleges and universities in recent years have begun to rethink their core course requirements.
One reason for change is that universities want to better ensure students learn meaningful skills like critical thinking and writing to prepare them for life after college, she said.
"Students are not getting much out of the general education curriculum because it's not articulated or connected to any goals," Roksa said. "Students see gen ed as this thing that they have to get through, which is very unfortunate because general curriculum is where students begin to really develop some of these crucial, broader skills."
At UA, academic departments are refining how to assess whether students in core courses are picking up specific learning objectives, Jolliffe said.
He said a moratorium has been placed on adding new courses to UA's core curriculum as faculty prepare for a visit the university is expecting this April from the Higher Learning Commission, an accreditation agency.
Roksa said universities should be turning to such learning assessments to make adjustments in the classroom.
"The whole assessment process and using assessments to improve student outcomes is fairly new, if you look at the history of higher education," Roksa said.
She said employers now want students not just with specialized knowledge, but a broad set of skills like teamwork and self-motivation that can be developed in general curriculum courses.
"The problem is that the general curriculum is never articulated in those terms. It's articulated in terms of X number of courses in X number of disciplines," Roksa said.
Metro on 12/19/2016