Requiring Research Competence
in the Undgraduate Curriculum
Powerpoint Presentation

Leaders: Robert J. Thompson, Jr., Dean, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University
Lee Walker Willard, Associate Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University

Presenters: Mary Nijhout, Director, Undergraduate Research Support Office Deborah Wahl, Associate Director, Undergraduate Research Support Office, Duke University

Recorder: Renee Baird Snyder, Department of Education/Counseling and Personnel, University of Maryland at College Park

This session addressed the challenges and opportunities arising from the ongoing institutional effort to enhance undergraduate education at Duke University. The major components include a new general education undergraduate curriculum for Arts & Sciences, pedagogical changes, and enhancement of experiential learning opportunities. The goal was to have undergraduate education at Duke University be inquiry-based within the context of a culture of undergraduate research. The process was guided by a delineation of student learning objectives in terms of intellectual skills and broad dispositions.

The session began with a presentation on the new undergraduate curriculum, which utilizes a matrix architecture to emphasize the inter-relatedness of its components. These components include: areas of knowledge; modes of inquiry; focused inquiries; and competencies, including research. Pedagogical change emphasized discovery-based and experiential learning in courses, labs, and projects. The Office of Undergraduate Research Support was enhanced to provide an increasing array of opportunities for undergraduates to engage in mentored research projects during the academic year and summer. For outcome assessment, Duke developed student course evaluations that enable student appraisal of intellectual growth to be examined as a function of specific curricular components. The findings indicate that students consider research courses to require more work than other courses, but rate them as more intellectually stimulating and find the quality of instruction to be higher.

Participants also discussed the following questions:

• What does an undergraduate culture of research entail, and how can it be fostered?
• What strategies can be employed to develop curricular and experiential research opportunities in the humanities?
• How can external and institutional resources be generated and best utilized to foster undergraduate participation in mentored research projects?

Main Points

The recent curricular revisions at Duke emphasized integrating research competency requirements into the undergraduate curriculum and making research competency central to the undergraduate experience. The members of the Curriculum Review Committee, tried to look at "the whole picture." One main consideration was: How does education at a research university differ from that at other institutions? Should we not be intentional about this? What is essential? The Committee felt that it was important for students at a research university to have a common, inquiry-based experience that represents the character of the community. Members also realized that in order to welcome undergraduates and help them to join the community, undergraduates needed to build their skills and foundations so that they could participate.

The Committee worked for a year and a half, spelling out expectations regarding the curriculum. Members wanted it to have a specific Duke experience with some commonalities, but did not want to take the approach of core courses, which would be alien to the Duke environment. They had to think in a different way about the kinds of learning experiences they wanted all Duke undergraduate students to have. They realized that students could meet common objectives through different processes.

They took a number of approaches to achieving this, focusing not only on content but also on process. Learning is a developmental process over time. They looked at three inter-related areas through which improvement could be made: curriculum, pedagogy and experiential learning. They revised the curriculum to include research courses as well as additional writing courses and other foundational requirements. They emphasized active pedagogical approaches, and providing more opportunities for experiential learning.

Evaluation of the changes has been important and has demonstrated success. Course evaluations, often maligned, have been a valuable tool.

All overheads from the presentation are available online as a further resource.

Opportunities for Change

1. The accreditation process, which all institutions go through, can be a good incentive to make changes and can provide directions for those changes. Duke took advantage of the self-study option offered by the Southern Association for College Student Affairs in its 1997-98 accreditation.
2. "If it's not broken, why fix it?" Faculty perceptions that Duke's undergraduate education was "broken" also helped to spur change. Across all the divisions, faculty felt that the curriculum needed redoing in order to broaden students' foundations

Effective Program: Elements of Duke's Enhancement of Undergraduate Education

Duke had four goals in mind:

1. Enhance undergraduate education through curriculum, pedagogy, and experiential education.
2. Help students move along the continuum of ability in focus areas.
3. Develop a specific Duke experience with some commonalities.
4. Double the numbers of students exposed to mentored research.

Initially Committee members focused on incorporating three items into the curriculum: student learning objectives, 'process of inquiry' skills, and active pedagogy.

Student Learning Objectives: The objectives of the revised curriculum reflected both intellectual skills as well as broader "dispositions" or "understandings."

Intellectual skills: Students should be able to read, think, and reason critically; to formulate, support, and evaluate an argument; to solve problems; to analyze, integrate and synthesize information and ideas; and to write effectively. Since students come in at different points on a continuum, one of the main challenges is to help them move along this continuum in developing and refining their skills.

Dispositions/understandings: Students should demonstrate:

• Epistemological sophistication-knowledge about knowledge; fluency across the boundaries of knowledge; integration of knowledge across disciplines.
• Cross-cultural fluency, specifically language skills necessary.
• Scientific/quantitative literacy, which is essential and explicit.
• Collaboration-an ability to work together in teams, as well as ability to compete.
• Civic and social responsibility-the ability to be an active agency for community change.
• Life-long learning: How to be self-regulated life-long learners. This goes back to epistemology. Sophisticated students are able to learn what they need to know.

'Process of Inquiry:
General Skills: Make observations. Pose questions. Identify sources of information. Analyze information. Identify assumptions. Propose explanation or prediction. Consider alternative explanations. Communicate findings.
Scientific Skills: Formulate a hypothesis. Design an experiment or study. Conduct research procedures. Collect data. Analyze findings.

Pedagogies of Engagement:
Problem-based learning; experiential learning-service learning and research service learning. Chance to reflect on own experiences.

Infusion of Research Competency Requirements

Students are required to: Study four areas of knowledge (narrowed from six), engage in two modes of inquiry, engage in three focused inquiries, and acquire three competencies.

1. Four knowledge areas: Arts and literatures. Civilizations. Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Social Sciences.
2. Two modes of inquiry: Quantitative, inductive and deductive reasoning; and Interpretive and aesthetic approaches.
3. Three focused inquiries: Cross-cultural. Science; technology, and society; and Ethical inquiry.
4. Three competencies: Writing, foreign language, and research. The Committee wanted to make the writing course the cornerstone of Dukes' undergraduate education and to move students from the type of writing characteristic of high school work to what is needed in the university. Members wanted students to know how to make and support an argument, acknowledge others' work, and make claims in public space. A detailed description of these requirements is available online at: http://pmac.aas.duke.edu/c2k/

Any given course might satisfy several requirements. One course might, for example, serve the writing, arts and literature, and research course requirements. What any given course does depends on what the faculty member teaching it wants it to achieve; the faculty submit syllabi to the Curriculum Review Committee for approval and designation in particular areas of competence.

Research Intensive (R-Designated) Courses
These are courses that encourage students to become active participants in the discovery, critical evaluation and application of knowledge. Courses coded "R" enable students to come to terms with the ways that new knowledge is created, organized, accessed and synethesized in the various disciplines. There are 3000 Research-designated (R-designated) courses listed in a database. Faculty were asked to revisit their courses and submit requests for R-designation (and/or designation for other requirements), with supporting materials, to the Curriculum Review Committee, which gave the courses a new set of codes designating the requirements they satisfy.

All Duke undergraduates in arts and sciences must complete at least one research-intensive course.

Learning objectives. Students should be able to formulate a question, analyze material, and integrate findings; participate in a mentoring relationship with faculty; and develop a research paper, poster session, performance or a product that describes or exemplifies an understanding of how knowledge in the discipline is generated, organized, and presented. Every R-designated course requires some product. That product varies by department; it is not chosen by the Dean's office. In Psychology, for instance, students have to get a data set and do something with it.

One aim of establishing the R-designated courses was to at least double the number of students exposed to mentored research. Duke in particular has medical and environmental research applications that are amenable to student participation. The R-designated courses help achieve this goal by "raising the floor." They are part of a scaffolding approach, to create a spectrum of research participation, The research courses make up the first level, followed by mentored research and finally independent study.

Challenges

A major challenge was to offer a sufficient number of courses with the appropriate codes distributed across various domains for students to graduate. Departments with large numbers of majors can have great difficulty offering enough R-designated courses to accommodate all the students. The faculty, however, have bought into the new curriculum and have willingly reviewed and revised their courses. Duke also engaged in a capital campaign to raise funds to support the new curriculum.

Student course evaluation items
The course evaluations -- by student self-report on bubble forms - asked for both an overall appraisal of the quality of the course and the quality of instruction, as well as for an appraisal of specific course characteristics such as the amount of effort required, the difficulty of the subject matter, and the extent of intellectual stimulation. In particular, the Curriculum Review Committee looked at the extent to which the courses facilitated three learning objectives and contributed to the students' progress in these areas:

1. Gaining factual knowledge, understanding fundamental concepts and principles, learning how to apply knowledge, concepts, principles, or theories to a specific situation or problem.
2. Learning to analyze ideas, arguments, and points of view; learning to synthesize and integrate knowledge; learning to conduct inquiry through methods of the field; and learning to evaluate the merits of ideas and competing claims.
3. Developing skills in oral expression and in writing.

Compared to the mean of all courses in Arts and Sciences, the quality of instruction in R-designated courses is considered better and the courses themselves are more intellectually stimulating. These courses are also perceived as requiring more work than other courses at Duke, although the subject matter is not necessarily more difficult.

The writing courses have received higher evaluations than they did before the revisions, although some courses and sets of courses are below the average. The faculty has found the often-maligned course evaluations to be a useful tool for understanding how the courses contribute to students' development. Students differentiated among the kinds of courses offered by different departments and among other dimensions, such as class size. The research code alone was found to carry weight.

Undergraduate Research Support Office

This Office provides funding for students who are engaged in research or scholarly projects with faculty. Students in all disciplines may receive URS grants, which take the form of either a salary, if they are not receiving academic credit for their work, or small grants to defray research-related expenses for independent study courses. The office also administers other programs that support student research, such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellows, the Mellon Foundation Minority Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the Beckman Scholars Program.

The Office also coordinates an annual showcase, held in April, of student research, scholarship, and creative work known as "Visible Thinking." Office staff are constantly working to increase the number and diversity of students who participate in this event. The first year in which this event was held, for example, only two students in the humanities participated. After staff made a point of talking to faculty and promoting the event to humanities students, the next year more than twenty projects in the humanities were presented. The number of students participating from the social sciences also doubled. In this, the third year, the staff is doing significant outreach to capture students who are receiving honors in their departments. The University President is a visible supporter of the event, and emphasizes that research by students is a valued part of the community and should be celebrated.

Resources

Web sites:
Duke University
Curriculum 2000: http://pmac.aas.duke.edu/c2k/
Office of Research Support: http://www.aas.duke.edu/trinity/research/