General Education Forum on Quantitative Intensive Courses: Questions to Consider

The fifth focus group of our series, centered on Quantitative Intensive Courses, will be this Friday, 28 February, at 12:15 pm in the Laurel Forum. The GERTF and Design Team would like to invite all interested faculty and staff members to attend this session (and the others), which will be facilitated by a GERTF member.

At this forum, we will participate in a conversation about some of the models for quantitative intensive courses in general education programming. We will discuss the issues faculty indicated were most important to them when they raised the possibility of this curricular element during the Listening Project. We anticipate using these discussions to assist us as we think about writing charges for the specific curricular requirements. The Design Team has reached some preliminary conclusions about the structure and content of a revised curriculum, but would like the benefit of your input on the following questions:

1. In the Listening Project, faculty indicated an interest in an additional quantitative experience for students beyond the Math requirement. What are your desired outcomes for students taking such a course?

2. What knowledge, skills, and awareness do you want to give students the opportunity to develop in such a requirement?

3. What interconnections to the liberal arts curriculum would you like this requirement to facilitate?

4. What criteria do you think are most important as identifying features of such courses? What level of math should be necessary to successfully complete such a course? Should a student be able to satisfy the requirement of taking a Quantitative Intensive course by taking the second course in a mathematics sequence?

5. How extensively should the quantitative application be integrated with the content of the course? In your view, should the application of quantitative techniques add to the student’s understanding of mathematics, course content, or both?

6. What issues or concerns do you have regarding the oversight of such a course?

We are eager to have the benefit of your input, ideas, and expertise as we move toward a model for the revised general education curriculum.