Penn's pilot curriculum earns grant

Beginning October 1, the College of Arts and Sciences will receive a $331,903 grant from the Department of Education to fund the experimental pilot curriculum over the next three years. The grant is from the DOE's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. The College's grant comes specifically from the Comprehensive Program, a division that focuses on funding innovative projects that can serve as models for educational reform. And as College Dean Richard Beeman said of the development of a new curriculum: "We are trying to design an education that will better serve the needs of students in the new century." This fall the school launched a five-year pilot curriculum that was approved by faculty last December. This year, 200 freshmen will take part in the new curriculum, which offers four interdisciplinary courses and enhanced opportunities for undergraduate research. At the end of the five years, faculty will vote on whether to implement this curriculum for the entire college. The DOE lauds Penn's decision to go through this trial run before overhauling the entire curriculum, Beeman explained. The grant will be used to fund the ongoing evaluation process of the pilot curriculum, ranging from surveys on the program to symposiums with education experts to evaluate the pilot curriculum. According to Frank Frankfort, a DOE official who evaluates proposals for comprehensive grants, a successful proposal is "any good proposal that proposes to benefit higher education." He emphasized, however, that the proposal must also provide a "model" that other schools can use and that benefits schools nationwide in "any area in which it is demonstrated that there is a need for reform." And with the help of the three-year grant, that is just what the College plans to do. The College will be evaluating the "method of reform" that it is using to evaluate general education at Penn. College officials contend that Penn's method of evaluating its core requirements -- by running both the general requirement and pilot curriculum at the same time for a five-year trial period -- is what makes Penn's approach to reform so unique. "What most people consider to be new about the pilot curriculum is not the structure but the process of experimentation," Beeman said. Frankfort said the competition typically receives 2,000 applications per year. Of these applications, 420 are then selected to write proposals and 125 are selected from these. From these proposals, depending on the scope of the project, grants can range from $200,000 to $600,000 for three years. The proposal, written by Kent Peterman, director of academic affairs in the College, outlines several general issues that plague higher education. Among issues that the Pilot Curriculum Evaluation Committee -- composed of four faculty members and one student -- will examine are questions such as whether four interdisciplinary courses and a set of electives can provide students with a comprehensive education. Another question is whether the science component of the pilot curriculum can narrow the widening gap between sciences and humanities by providing non-science students with the science base they need to function in a modern world.

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