APPENDICESFEEDBACK FROM IHUM'S CONSTITUENTS
This self-study started in fall 2001-02, when IHUM's directors, together with Dr. Ann Porteus of the School of Education, brainstormed a number of issues, especially the question of which groups had some stake in the IHUM program, and how their views of the program should be solicited. It seems obvious that many groups could lay some claim to the role of stakeholder (the Undergraduate Admissions Office and the Development Office, to name only two). But clearly the central stakeholders are the students who take classes in the program, the faculty and the fellows who teach them, and the departments from which the faculty are drawn. We determined, as best we could, to solicit views and opinions primarily from these four groups, and to use their feedback, along with our own reflections, analysis and research, to inform our self-study. Students In some ways, a considerable amount of data already existed representing student opinion. We had end-quarter Registrar's evaluation forms for both lecture and section components of IHUM from fall 1998 to the present (the evaluations from the first year of the program, 1997-98, in which only 1/3 of the freshmen were taking something called IHUM, and in which some of those IHUM classes were hybrids with CIV, were sent somewhere other than the IHUM central office). We also had overlapping in-house evaluations for fall 1997 to spring 2001. We have summarized all of these results in a detailed fashion. We decided in fall 2001 to add to these data a web-based questionnaire in which we asked currently enrolled IHUM students their views of the function of lectures, sections, readings, and graded assignments in IHUM, and how they assessed their own fall IHUM in light of their answers. Since this questionnaire represented a webpage students had to pass through in order to express their preferences for a winter/spring IHUM sequence, the response rate was high (1105). About 1/10 of these questionnaires (117) were randomly chosen for a detailed summary. In spring 2002, we invited a random subset of the same freshman class to participate in one of ten focus groups facilitated by graduate students from the School of Education. A total of 75 students discussed their IHUM experiences for an hour in small groups (in a guided way), and the facilitators summarized their discussions for us. We have in turn distilled the ten focus group reports in a single summary. We attempted to assemble randomly 50 upperclassmen that same quarter in five focus groups. Only 27 showed up for these focus groups, but we have reports of all those discussions as well, and a summary of those reports. Dissatisfied with the number of upperclassmen represented in our focus groups, we tried again in fall 2002 to assemble 50 upperclassmen, but this time ended up with only 21. We have reports of those discussions as well, as well as a summary of those reports. Our last source of data for student views was the 2002 spring Senior Survey, to which we added both quantitative and qualitative questions. One source of major disappointment was that only 317 students returned that survey, of whom 198 identified themselves as having taken IHUM (the other possibilities being CIV, SLE and "Other"). The other disappointment was that the quantitative questions were tabulated in such a way as to make it impossible to determine what form of Area One class individual respondents had taken. We have thus relied on the answers to the qualitative questions only in our overall summary. Finally, as we were going to press with this review, we received
the results of a "satisfaction" survey on the freshman year
experience conducted by the Dean of Freshmen and Transfer Students. We
have included the data relevant to IHUM, along with a short discussion
of them, in the Responses of Students section below. Teaching Fellows In fall 2002, we sent a questionnaire to all past and present IHUM fellows for whom we had contact information. 78 questionnaires were sent; 34 responses were received. We have summarized their responses. Faculty Also in fall 2002, we send a questionnaire to all faculty members we could track down who had ever participated in teaching an IHUM class (74 in all). 28 responded, almost all of whom still teach in the program. We have summarized their responses. Department Chairs In fall 2002, we also sent out a questionnaire to all chairs of departments or programs with even a potential stake in IHUM, whether they had faculty currently teaching in IHUM or not. 14 questionnaires were returned, of which only 8 represented departments actually participating in IHUM. We have summarized these responses. The data as presented above run to many hundreds of pages. For ease of use, we have chosen to organize our appendices into levels, beginning with this level, an interpretive overview of the kinds of feedback we solicited and received. This level is supported by summaries of feedback we have received from our constituents. These summaries, in turn, are undergirded by the compiled responses for each category of feedback. In the web-based version of our self-study, these various levels of analysis, summary, and raw data are linked for ease of access. In the printed version, these links are indicated with underlining, so that the reader may refer to the web version for further information at these points. To the best of our ability, we have removed all references to specific faculty members, fellows, and courses, whether positive or negative. We have also removed the names of respondents to our fellows and faculty questionnaires, though we are aware that in some cases they might be easy to reconstruct. We have not removed the names of departments, as this omission would either significantly lessen the informational value of the data or be trivially reconstructable. It should be noted that since, for many of these summaries, IHUM staff did the summary work, it was desirable to have some kind of outside monitors of that summary work. To this end, we established an IHUM Review Advisory Committee, including two student members; two members of the faculty (one in the humanities, one not); the Director of CTL; Dr. Ann Porteus from the School of Education (and, initially, one of her graduate students/trained facilitators); one IHUM fellow; and three members of the IHUM staff involved in much of the writing. These committee members read many of the summaries, as well as the data on which they were based, and deemed the summaries representative of the data. In terms of students' satisfaction with the IHUM Program, the Registrar's numbers for the past several years show a distinctly positive trend, with some interesting differentiations:
The IHUM in-house surveys, which we designed to track some specific goals of the program that are not traceable from the Registrar's evaluations, are more or less consistent with these impressions, although they present some refinements, and a slightly different 4-year span (1997-2001). The entire situation is complicated a bit by the fact that IHUM students were the privileged experimental group while CIV was being phased back early in this period, resulting in a spike in 1997-98 in a number of categories. Later data falls for some categories of IHUM courses, corresponding to the historical moment when students in IHUM perceived that they were in the mainline courses rather than the exciting alternative ones. Students who filled out the Senior Survey in spring of 2002 belonged in general to the 1998-99 cohort of IHUM students, the beginning point for the Registrar's numbers cited above. Although there is no way of predicting the bias arising from the low number of returns on the survey, we found that approximately one-third of the students were favorable or very favorable, one-third unfavorable or very unfavorable, and one-third neutral or unclear. It is pleasant to note that even some of those who assessed their own IHUM experience unfavorably detected a more positive response in younger students. Continuing from the earliest group of IHUM classes to more recent ones (though for the spring 2002 upperclass focus groups there may be some overlap with the Senior Survey), we come to the spring 2002 and fall 2002 upperclass focus groups. Here, given the nature of the questions and the fairly unquantifiable nature of the discussions, we simply have to list some of the positive and negative points students made about IHUM:
Areas that sometimes needed improvement were the following:
Most students either have come to view IHUM more favorably since they took it, or they always liked it. On a skills question, some students mentioned critical thinking, while many mentioned writing; more negatively, many mentioned questionable skills such as how to get by with skimming the reading, figuring out which lectures one can miss; and how to B.S. In answer to a question asked explicitly of the fall 2002 focus groups, a fairly large proportion of the 21 students reported having taken courses in or majored in subjects related to their IHUM experience. As a student in one group pointed out, however, the interests which lead to an ultimate major or class selection surely plays a role in one's choice of IHUM class. In the upperclass focus groups where the question was explicitly asked, almost all of the students were in favor of having an Area One requirement, though there were a number of different ideas of what form it should take (e.g., the present form, three separate courses, two courses, a course combined with the writing requirement). This brings us to the newest students in our data, last year's freshman class. The answers to the questions on the fall 2001 web survey were highly encouraging. In answer to a question about the function of IHUM lectures, they noted especially that lectures should, among other things, illuminate and contextualize the texts chosen, give students different disciplinary perspectives on those subjects, and broaden the nature of students' interests. Sections should, among other things, both encourage all students to develop and express their own thoughts on readings and lectures, and also expand on and clarify those lectures and readings. Students wanted to be exposed to and learn how to feel comfortable with different perspectives on texts, with different kinds of texts, and with ambiguity. On a practical level, they wanted to learn how to pick out the main or important points and themes in a given text. Assignments should be geared toward solidifying and deepening students' understanding of the material, allowing them to develop and argue for their own perspective on it, and generally fostering their clarity of thought, creativity, writing skills and rhetorical abilities. Given these desiderata that they themselves had described, 40% of the 117 students in the sample were extremely positive about their own IHUM experience; 30% were positive; 12% were neutral; 7.7% were negative; 4.3% were extremely negative; and 6% were hard to interpret. Heartening as these results are, the Spring 2002 freshman focus groups tell a somewhat different story. There, in addition to commenting on the pleasures of enthusiastic and dynamic lectures, reading important texts, and being exposed to new and interesting perspectives, students complained about inequities in grading and amounts of coursework, overbearing teaching fellows, the size and length of sections, too much or too little diversity in IHUM's curriculum. They seem to have learned the same skills, positive and negative, that their upperclass colleagues had. As we noted earlier, only as this self-study was going to press did we receive the IHUM data from the Dean of Freshman and Transfer Students' questionnaire on student satisfaction with the freshman year experience. IHUM was an exception on this questionnaire, since most of the other categories students were asked to rank had to do with their dormitory and community experiences, student services and the like. We also find the adjective "satisfied" a little ambiguous for our purposes; a student's level of satisfaction with IHUM may have at least as much to do with the grade received as with the quality of the course. That said, data from this questionnaire are still relatively consistent with our own findings on this cohort of students. Overall, on a 7-point scale 48% were satisfied or very satisfied with IHUM overall, 31% were dissatisfied in some degree, and 21% were neutral in satisfaction (which for a required course might be weighed more on the plus side). In a breakdown of skills the students were supposed to acquire in their IHUM courses, 63% of students were satisfied in some degree (41%) or neutral (22%) with respect to their acquisition of reading skills, 70 % with the development of their critical thinking abilities (satisfied 51%, neutral 19%), 65% with their enhanced ability to learn from lectures (satisfied 42%, neutral 23%), and 68% with their enhanced ability to participate in sustained intellectual discussion (50% satisfied, 18% neutral). Students were more satisfied or neutral regarding the success of their Winter/Spring classes (72%, of which 57% satisfied, 15% neutral) than with that of their interdisciplinary Fall quarter courses (62%, of which 44% satisfied, 18% neutral). All this leads us to a final comment on student attitudes toward IHUM. Though we think the data bear out an increasingly positive approach of students to IHUM, there is a culture of negativity surrounding student attitudes toward IHUM, as the only really required course for all freshmen. If students don't enter our courses with that attitude (and the fall survey results suggest that the majority do not), they are encouraged by the existing Stanford student culture to take increasingly critical, if often shallow, public swipes at the program. Indeed, since focus groups are often susceptible to a kind of mass mentality, this may not be the best method to assess students' real impressions of the program. We end this section by quoting from reports of two different upperclass focus groups::
The postdoctoral fellows who responded were, in general, quite happy with the program, but nevertheless had suggestions for improvement. To summarize the main points:
The 28 responding Faculty represented 12 departments in H&S, the Law School, and the School of Medicine. An overwhelming majority of them (25 out of 28) expressed themselves as satisfied or very satisfied with their participation in IHUM. To summarize the other main points of their responses:
As we noted earlier, there was a disappointing return rate for these questionnaires. Except for the History Department, which clearly would like to be in complete control of the program for all three quarters, the responses to IHUM as currently structured ranged from positive or enthusiastic (Classics, German Studies, Music, Spanish and Portuguese) to accepting (Cultural and Social Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities). Asian Languages is probably in the first camp, but doesn't yet have a course sequence in IHUM. Part of the neutrality of CASA and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities may be ascribed to the nature and tenure of section leaders in IHUM. CASA feels that the three-year limit for these postdoctoral fellows is too inflexible, while Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities regrets the loss of a teaching opportunity for its graduate students (since IHUM section leaders must hold doctorates). Although very supportive of IHUM, German Studies agrees with the latter regret. Two of the departments (Classics and Spanish and Portuguese) make a point of emphasizing that the structure and flexibility of IHUM were favorable factors in their participation in the program. It seems likely (also given faculty questionnaire responses) that IHUM's one-quarter/two-quarter structure made it possible for Drama, French and Italian, and Slavic Languages to participate. The majority of responding departments felt that fall IHUM classes helped prepare students for their own course sequences, and that IHUM as a whole gave students skills and perspectives useful for further study in their fields. Most of them believe they derive majors from their IHUM classes, and most of them offer credit toward the major for their IHUM classes. While all of these departments regard the teaching fellows in their programs positively, most of them characterize their formal integration into said departments as "cordial but insubstantial." Some are actively working to improve that situation. |
Stanford University, 2003
http://www.stanford.edu/group/vpue/ihumrev