Assessment & Teaching Dictionary

A group of courses in which students enroll as a block and which are intentionally taught as a unit.

Since 1984, Seattle Central Community College's Coordinate Studies students have participated in program ranging from 11 to 18 credits and team-taught by two to four instructors. Students attend class for 4 - 6 hours a day as if enrolled in one course. Coordinated Studies students are more involved in activities, hod more positive views of the college, and persist into the second year at higher rates.
The University of Washington introduced Freshman Interest Groups (FIGs) in 1987 with the intention of making the university seem smaller and less intimidating to freshman. A FIG consists of 20 - 24 students sharing a cluster of two or three courses organized around a common theme. Students also attend a weekly seminar organized by a peer. FIG students have higher grades and higher persistence rates.
The University of Missouri-Columbia has adapted FIGs by adding a residential component. Groups of 20 students housed on the same residence hall floor share three academic courses and a peer-taught freshman seminar.
Restricted to commuting students, the Scholar's Community at the University of Houston includes an on-campus "home base," with lounges, study areas, locker space, and computers. This provides enhanced access to faculty, staff, and peer mentors.
In large universities, most learning community programs are implemented horizontally across colleges. Portland State University's effort also extends vertically. Students are enrolled in freshman and sophomore inquiry programs that stress critical thinking, communication, human experience, ethics, and social responsibility. A two-term senior capstone integrates learning and community action.

CREATIONISM, loosely defined, is the belief that the world and the organisms in it exist because they were created as forms by a designer/creator of some sort. The term as forms means that types of creatures such as "dog," "salmon," "maple," and "amoeba," are the objects created and that physical forces cause some looseness (e.g., beagle, greyhound, mastiff) within each form. However, one form does not change into another form and, consequently, the change of some ancestral primate into human and gorilla (or some ancestral carnivore into bear, wolf, and dog) has not occurred. Physical forces exist that may permit alterations within the created forms, but not between them. The nature of the designer/creator is almost always tied to a scriptural God.

EVOLUTION, loosely defined, is the scientific understanding, almost always based on uniformitarian principles and observable evidence, that life forms have changed since the time they began on this planet (the mechanisms by which life arose on the planet in the first place are also believed to be rationally approachable, but understanding evolutionary mechanisms does not depend on first comprehending how life arrived). Evolutionary thinking implies that the rules by which life arrived and changes occur can be understood empirically and, moreover, that rationally observable physical forces (i.e., the "environment") account for those changes. Human intervention can harness the "rules" to produce artifically directed evolutionary processes, such as through the artificial selection of breeding. In the absence of human intervention, environmentally driven processes act through such processes as natural selection, sexual selection, or punctuated equilibrium. The presence or absence of a designer/creater to establish the rules or set the whole thing in motion (sometimes called theistic evolultion) is not susceptible to testing by this line of thinking.

Problem Based Learning

A style of pedagogy in which students are presented, first, with a major problem that they cannot answer and, second, with questions about what they'd have to learn in order to solve the problem. This style of teaching and learning is used in some medical school curricula, such as the one at Southern Illinois University in Springfield. For example, new medical students there might be presented with a patient who exhibits a deep, non-clearing cough. The major problem is, "What is wrong with this patient, if anything, and what treatment, if any, is appropriate?" New medical students are not likely to be able to perform a logical diagnosis. "What skills, facts, and philosophies," they are asked, "would you need to learn in order to solve this problem effectively?" Students respond to the secondary questions by suggesting they need to know how to use a stethoscope (skill), that they need to understand some cardiovascular and pulmonary physiology (facts), and that they need to know how to approach a patient in order to take a history (philosophy). The course professors respond to the students by teaching them over the next several weeks the very things they have asked to learn. Then, when this is complete, the patient is reintroduced. If the students can now make an accurate diagnosis and distinguish between, say, congestive heart failure and chronic asthma, the class moves on to the next problem. Organization of learning material in this fashion is sometimes called "just-in-time" learning because the teachable moment is reinforced at the time it is really relevant to the student.

Staged Writing

A series of assignments that help students achieve increasingly sophisticated levels of thinking and writing. One staircase of suitably staged writing assignments is: description/narration, analysis, comparison/contrast, application, case study. That is, description/narration asks for recognition of an issue through presentation of a personal encounter. This is followed by analysis, which is an act of decomposing an idea into component parts. Comparison/contrast can be viewed as decomposing two ideas into parts and weighing their similarities and differences. Application is the use of a developed idea as a tool to probe a constrained situation. Finally, a case study is application of the developed idea to a more complex problem. Application and case study are sometimes combined. Staged writing is pioneered by Prof. Carolyn Haynes in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, Ohio, in order to promote interdisciplinary thinking and writing.

Subtext

A term that refers to the transferrable baccalaureate skills such as writing, speaking, critical thinking, creative thinking, contextual thinking, cultural appreciation, scientific literacy, quantitative inquiry, and tolerance of ambiguity. Many of these skills are explicit parts of general education courses but they also are developed and reinforced in major courses as well. Subtext differs from text, which refers to a course's disciplinary content.

Text

A term that refers to the disciplinary content of a course. For instance, in a human anatomy and physiology course, the text might be the names of bones, the function of the kidney, or the metabolic pathway of cholesterol synthesis. In an ethics course, the text might include detailed knowledge of Kant's categorical imperative or understanding Spencer's derivative interpretations of Darwin's evolutionary theory. In economics, text might refer to the foundation underlying Samuelson's economic theories or the concept of the Laffer curve. Text differs from subtext, which refers to the transferrable baccalaureate skills.