An Assessment of Faculty Understanding and Attitudes Toward General Education at Utah State University

The data used for the following thesis were collected from tape-recorded interviews of a sample of U.S.U. faculty, and from a course evaluation list which each of these participating faculty members were asked to fill out. Thirty-six faculty members were selected for the in-depth interviews, which was slightly more than five percent of the faculty. The study was done in conjunction with the Provost's General Education Evaluation Committee, as part of a larger evaluation of general education at U.S.U. Thirty-four of the U.S.U. professors were interviewed and 28 of these completed the course evaluation lists. This thesis evaluates faculty conceptualizations of general education at three levels: the philosophic, the objective-oriented and the curricular. It also examines faculty interest in and satisfaction with the current U.S.U. program. It was found that at the philosophic level of definition, there was almost complete consensus. Faculty members thought that general education should be a broadening experience, giving the student a general, well-rounded view of the world. At the objective-oriented level, the respondents displayed considerable agreement as to the academic skills and areas in which students should show proficiency. The agreement was more complete, however, when the instructors were first presented with lists of these skills and areas, rather than asking them to identify them themselves. This seemed to indicate that the faculty members had not given a great deal of thought to general education objectives. At the curricular level, two different general education philosophies were shown to exist. Broad fundamentalists felt that general education should be a basic sampling of all of the major areas of knowledge, while diverse specialization advocates reasoned that general education should involve proficiency in various specialized areas outside of the major. Thus, while broad fundamentalists recognized only lower-level courses with basic-sounding titles as fit for general education, diverse ...