As the first class of the College's experimental pilot curriculum is now a semester away from graduation, the Pilot Curriculum Evaluation Committee is readying to issue its interim report.
According to committee Chairman Paul Allison, who also is the chairman of the Sociology Department, the interim report will be presented to College Dean Rebecca Bushnell and the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education toward the end of this month.
The six-member evaluation committee, comprised of non-pilot-affiliated faculty and one pilot student, was commissioned when the program was initiated in the fall of 2000. Its central task is to discern "what the pilot curriculum enables students to do at Penn that is different from the general education curriculum," said committee member and Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman.
Under the experimental curriculum, the number of general requirements was significantly reduced and an emphasis was placed on broader, more interdisciplinary courses. Specifically, the program implemented a team-teaching format and reduced the 10 sectors of the General Requirement to four general categories.
"We have just scratched the surface" in looking at questions such as whether the distributions of majors, or numbers of students taking dual degrees or minors has shifted with a different curricular structure, Peterman said.
The interim report, an initial draft for a final report which will show findings based on the Class of 2004, is an attempt to "generate a better kind of debate about where we should go," Peterman said. But, he adds, with data that is still incomplete.
The interim report "is integral in form, not conclusions right now," Bushnell said.
Indeed, this report is meant to aid the committee in writing a more comprehensive final report currently expected sometime at the end of next semester.
"My hope is that by then we will know much more definitively about the differences between the two curricula," Bushnell said.
Thus far the committee has been analyzing student transcripts, looking for patterns in areas such as the kinds of elective courses taken by pilot versus non-pilot students, as well as comparing course evaluations of pilot and general requirement classes.
One particular area of interest has been the science requirement of the pilot curriculum. In the general curriculum, four out of 10 requirements are in the sciences; two of the four pilot requirements are in the sciences.
"Faculty in natural sciences are concerned that pilot students are taking less science classes," Peterman said. However, according to both Peterman and Allison, preliminary data thus far has shown that non-science majors in the pilot take the same overall number of science courses as non-science majors in the general curriculum.
"The initial results are reassuring," Allison said.
The committee has additionally conducted a science literacy survey comprised of questions rating quality of education at Penn and 24 multiple choice questions measuring general science knowledge to compare results of the current pilot senior class with random samplings of seniors in the general curriculum.
Aside from surveys, another method of data collection has been through focus groups and interviews with pilot students, faculty and advisers. These discussions have then been compared with those from students, faculty and advisers unaffiliated with the program.
Feedback from these discussions has already been incorporated into the structure of the program. As an example, Peterman stated that in the first years of the program, students criticized the team-teaching of the requirement courses, meant to integrate different disciplines, claiming it was akin to cramming three courses into one without integration.
"We wanted it to be give-and-take, taking different perspectives on the same topic," Peterman said, and thus recommendations were made for faculty to "give up a little on content and focus more on comparing." The number of team-taught classes has also been scaled down.
After the final report in spring 2004, Peterman said that the predicted timeline is for a faculty vote on curricular changes to the general curriculum to occur sometime in April 2005, after which he hopes fall 2006 will be the first class to see the changes.
However, Peterman is careful to emphasize that these dates are only tentative.
"We don't want to sacrifice our goal to stay on the time table."
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