Editor’s Note

Frequently faculty members revise and reform their general education courses. They often introduce innovative structures and content to meet their students’ needs. In this quarterly issue, we begin with an article by Olsen, Bekken, McConnell, and Walter that describes the implementation of a two-year interdisciplinary curriculum focused on the theme of earth sustainability. In their article “Teaching for Change: Learning Partnerships and Epistemological Growth,” they present the results from assessments they conducted on this new curriculum and its impact on student development. They find that this new curriculum significantly improved students’ epistemological growth over the traditional general education. The new curriculum relied on the integration of more constructivist principles and practices than had been utilized in the past. This example of a major innovation clearly demonstrates that the curriculum and pedagogy can be deliberately designed to make students more self-conscious about their learning and help to enhance stronger learning.

The next article, by Dunlap, Anderson, Rademacher, and McMenamy, explores the contribution that upper-division nursing and teaching courses make in relation to the achievement of certain types of general education competencies including reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking. In the article “An Interdisciplinary Focus Group Study on Students’ Perceptions of Preparedness for Upper-Division Coursework in Teaching and Nursing,” the authors discuss differences in the importance of acquired skills mainly in reading and writing. Preservice teachers rated analysis skills somewhat higher than did their preservice nursing peers. Teacher candidates emphasized analyzing content, while preservice nurses focused on understanding research. Overall, student participants perceived that they learned more when their course experiences were professionally relevant and practice-based.

The final article, by McCleary and associates, focuses on student participation in large classes. In their article “Balancing Participation Across Students in Large Classes via Randomized Participation Credit,” the authors find that with respect to achieving greater balance in discussion across students, the greatest improvement was found when decreasing the percentage of nonparticipating students and increasing the percentage of credit-level participation. In addition, they find that instructors’ behaviors, including asking questions and providing positive feedback, did not enhance or diminish any treatment effects.

I hope that you find these articles useful as they seek to assess various dimensions of student learning and development. You may wish to contribute to this dialogue by sending in an article about the results from your own general education assessments.