Freshman Focus Groups—Spring 2001—Summary

In the spring quarter of 2001, from April 22 to May 2, ten focus groups were held with frosh who were at that time several weeks into the spring quarter of their winter/spring IHUM sequence. We randomly selected students from the entire IHUM roster, aiming for a total of 100 students. To encourage their participation in these groups, we offered $25 Stanford Bookstore certificates. Ultimately, only 75 students showed up, and the groups ranged in size from 4 to 12.

 

Facilitators for these groups were graduate students in the School of Education, trained for the task by Dr. Ann Porteus, their instructor in an Education School class on evaluation. Each focus group had both a facilitator and a note-taker from the same group of grad students. The facilitators were responsible for writing up reports of views expressed in the focus groups.

 

Each group was asked to discuss five questions in the course of an hour. In what follows below, we attempt to present the main points which emerged in most discussions through a summary of ten reports of ten discussions.

 

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1.      What did you like about your IHUM courses (both fall and winter/spring)? what specific characteristics of the courses worked for you?

 

There were a few criteria that were mentioned quite often as making for a successful IHUM course. These included

·        The enthusiasm and dynamism of the lecturers

·        The ability to explore interesting (frequently classical) texts in depth, texts which students might not otherwise have read

·        The use of alternative media and field trips

·        The exposure to different perspectives on texts (specifically when different lecturers responded not only to the texts but also each other, rather than simply alternating)

·        Availability and interest of lecturers in students

 

Needless to say, these things didn’t always happen in every course, but often enough to warrant frequent mention.

 

Other criteria mentioned a bit less often in these groups included among others good facilitation of discussions by the teaching fellows, good help from teaching fellows on papers, the existence of choice in picking winter/spring classes, lecture outlines, small sections, and the encouragement of freshman bonding (whether they liked IHUM or not).

 

 

2.      What if anything about your courses (both fall and winter/spring) should be improved? Do you have suggestions for carrying out the improvement?

 

There were a number of criticisms touched on in the answers to this question. Most frequent complaints were:

• Inconsistent grading and courseload
• Sections too long
• Discrepancies among teaching fellows
• Teaching fellows too controlling, or lecture too much
• Sections too large
• Diversity of readings (too much, too little, or too tacked on)
• IHUM, or individual courses, not clear enough about objectives

 

Other criteria included lack of continuity in courses, inadequate comments on written assignments, and the often unhelpful nature of unguided, student-facilitated discussions.

 

 

3.      Do you feel that sections related well to lectures (in fall and in winter/spring)? If so, what specific things made the connection work? if not, what could help?

 

A lot less time appears to have been spent discussing this question in the groups. Students were about evenly split on whether sections related well to lectures. A number of them seem to have taken this question to imply that section should somehow be an extension of the lecture, an idea of which they disapprove. Many students, quite correctly, restored the missing factor to this question, to wit the texts, some expressing their wish that lectures would deal with them in some significant way, others noting that the ideal section would respond to the lectures in some way at the beginning of class, but then go on to discuss the texts themselves in a structured and participatory way.

 

 

4.      Did you learn skills in your fall IHUM course that you used in your winter/spring IHUM courses? If so, please describe some of these skills.

 

Although the students in one focus group appear to have decided that they simply learned how to B.S. in their fall-quarter class, skills most frequently mentioned were

• How to organize papers, write
• How to take notes
• How to skim (or worse, how not to read all the work)

 

Some students felt that the classes were too different in content and instructor expectation to speak of generalizable skills, others stated that IHUM classes were content-based rather than skills classes, and what skills they learned were from the texts themselves.

 

Among the dubious skills a few students claim to have learned were which lectures they could skip and which teaching fellows they should pick as section leaders.

 

 

5.      A. On a scale of one to five, where one is “easy” and five is “demanding,” how would you rate the workload in your current IHUM course? By “workload” we mean amounts of reading and number, kind, and length of writing assignments.

 

B. How does your current IHUM workload compare with that of your fall IHUM course?

 

In aggregate, the students ranked both the fall and the winter/spring courses as intermediate in workload (with a slight tendency for fall-quarter courses to be easier). The aggregate, however, masks a great variation in difficulty rankings for individual students in specific courses, with some courses being ranked as low as 1 and others as high as 5 (both rankings can be found in each category).

 

C. Apart from any workload differences between fall and winter/spring IHUM courses resulting from their different structures, do you think the workload is more or less the same across the IHUM Program?

 

The answer to this of course falls out from the answer to the previous two sub-questions. A large majority of the 75 students felt that there were big workload differences across the IHUM program. Though amount of reading was mentioned as a variable, the number, kind and length of writing assignments seems to have been more important.