By Dennis O’Niel
Students will be randomly selected this week to provide feedback about the University of Louisville’s Quality Enhancement Plan on critical thinking.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is scheduled to be on Belknap campus today and tomorrow as part of U of L’s accreditation process. The university must maintain accreditation in order to receive federal financial aid.
The U of L QEP assesses students on the basis of critical thinking skills rather than memorization and recollection of facts. The plan seeks to cultivate these skills throughout a student’s general education as well as the rest of his undergraduate career.
Associate Provost Dr. Dale Billingsley said the QEP report sets out to move things away from lecture-based, teacher-centered classes. The emphasis will instead be placed on assignments and examinations, which help students develop their critical thinking skills and competence with course content.
The report was compiled by a team put together by Executive Vice President and University Provost Shirley Willihnganz, who failed to comment for this story, and included three U of L students, staff from the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning and faculty representatives from every program of the university. The team was led by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Dr. Julia Dietrich, who said the data was accumulated primarily through interviewing campus constituencies and garnering student opinion through focus groups.
“We found that the education faculty members want to give seems to be the one students want to receive,” Dietrich said. “It is very rare you find those two things coinciding, and that has been one of the most exciting aspects of this process to me.”
Connie Shumake, from the Office of Institutional Research, said the QEP team brought feedback which indicated students wanted more than to just memorize facts and wanted more opportunities to apply their education. She said the Ideas to Action project is the beginning of making that happen.
“But, as with any new process, there are many details to work out and how to do it the most efficiently is still being determined,” Shumake said.
Billingsley, who will be responsible for the implementation of the project, described the current project as highly conceptual and said many key elements of the project are just now being put into place.
“We think the development of the culminating experiences in each department should go along rather quickly,” Billingsley said, “but it will take longer to make reforms to the general education program because that program cuts across so many lines and touches so many students.”
Despite possible difficulties of the plan’s execution, Billingsley said the response from the administration about the plan has been extremely positive. “The president and the provost have exercised their own critical thinking skills as the ‘Ideas to Action’ project has developed and they continue to be involved and interested in this new initiative,” Billingsley said.
And faculty and students have also responded positively to the plan. “I believe that students will benefit from the plan,” said education graduate student Evelyn Woods, who worked on the QEP team. “The objectives of the plan are realistic and needed on every college campus.”
“To me, critical thinking is the fundamental purpose of an undergraduate education,” history professor Dr. John McLeod said. “I teach history because I feel it is the best way for students to develop their critical thinking skills.”
Senior English major Emilie McKiernan said when she has ventured into non-major classes she is often asked to memorize and regurgitate facts. “When I took my science courses, I was asked basically to recite the text book,” McKiernan said. “I think it is fantastic that the university wants to improve critical thinking skills in its students.”
“The ‘Ideas to Action’ project will aim to generalize the emphasis so it doesn’t seem like critical thinking is a particular subject in a course, but more just one of the basic tools of higher education,” Billingsley said.
Billingsley said student input on the conceptual plan remains a valuable aspect of the process and comments are always appreciated. “Students are going to be involved pretty significantly in the changes we are going to make to the course evaluation process for professors,” Billingsley said. “We also want to see other comments along the way from students.”
For more information about the QEP or “Ideas to Action,” visit http://www.louisville.edu/ideastoaction.
