Next year students will have the choice between being a part of the pilot program, taking the Freshman Interest Groups or taking GURs in the order they want.

“People are happy with Western, but they’re not as happy as we want them to be with the GURs,” VanderStaay said. “They don’t find the courses as valuable as their major courses and students don’t always understand their importance.”

A GUR strand would consist of a sequence of three interrelated courses, with one taken each quarter throughout the academic year.

Students would receive credit for four classes by taking three. The courses would consist of the same students and the professors of each course would work together to create the curriculum, VanderStaay said.

“Students would know each other and build kind of a community,” VanderStaay said. “Their courses would be integrated so they would be connected better, and they would see how different disciplines in the liberal arts can contribute to answering questions that are meaningful to them.”

VanderStaay said the GUR strands would be modeled after existing strands in the Honors Program, such as major cultural traditions (Honors 103, 104, and 105), which connects two humanities courses with a comparative gender and multicultural studies course.

Western participates in the National Study of Student Engagement survey to show how satisfied students are with the quality and engagement of courses in comparison to other universities, VanderStaay said.

“It’s very clear that our seniors are more satisfied [than other universities],” VanderStaay said. “They have more student-faculty interaction, they note more active learning, they note that there’s more course engagement and they give higher marks to the academic challenge of the course and to the quality of their faculty.”
Freshmen, however, reported less satisfaction than the seniors, according to the National Study of Student Engagement Survey.

“It raises the question: we know our freshman are relatively dissatisfied; what can we do to improve the freshman experience and improve student learning in the GURs?” VanderStaay said.

Due to a fairly low freshmen retention rate (about 80 percent), it was recommended that a GUR strand system be put in place about 10 years ago, but no such action was taken, VanderStaay said. It was also recommended that many programs Western currently has today be put in place, such as Western Reads and Summer Start, and that the university strengthen its Freshman Interest Groups.

One criticism of the GUR strands proposal is that the strands alone will not be enough to help all freshmen.

“Even if we had five of these next year, we’d only be reaching about 300 students,” VanderStaay said. “We need something to reach 3000 freshmen.”

In comparison, the University of Washington’s Freshman Interest Group program alone currently reaches about 80 percent of freshmen, VanderStaay said.

Many students currently enrolled in Freshman Interest Groups, such as University of Washington freshman Matt Scheid, have reported positive experiences with the interdisciplinary programs.

“I’ve had an amazing experience so far,” Scheid said. “I may just be really lucky, but all of the introductory classes have been engaging and I have found many of them to have passionate professors.”

Western freshman Chloe Rowles, however, said she feels having less structure when choosing classes can be an important part of the freshman experience.

“[GURs] have introduced me to new ideas that I hadn’t considered before,” Rowles said. “I think it’s important to figure out your classes for yourself as an essential transition out of high school.”

VanderStaay said he hopes to have two to five GUR Strands ready for fall quarter 2012.

“Right now we’re looking for faculty to think about ways to pilot this idea [and] what courses might be connected,” he said. “We’ll have a little bit of money to fund faculty to do some work with their curriculum this summer to connect the courses, so we’re about ready to call for pilot proposals.”

Looking for student input:
Steven VanderStaay,  vice provost for undergraduate education:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Committee on Undergraduate Education: Next meeting on Feb. 9 at
Old Main 435