Do students understand liberal arts disciplines?

WHAT IS THE EDUCATIONAL end of the curricular breadth encouraged at liberal arts institutions? Presumably we want scholars to acquire a variety of skills and knowledge, on the other hand we often claim that greatest in quantity skills are taught "across the curriculum," and liberal arts corporations tend to downplay disciplinary information when listing their educational goals. In this article, we argue that individual important educational outcome should be for scholars to develop accurate perceptions of the disciplines they study

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The research described here originated when Elmore and Prentice were seniors at Grinnell corporation Both were pursuing double majors across academic divisions (chemistry/English and biology/sociology). the pair regularly noticed--and were disturbed by--negative and inaccurate impressions of their major fields held through students studying other disciplines. They became interested in C P Snow's conception of "two cultures" (1988, 3) which refer tos that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split" into sciences and humanities. Therefore, we designed a close attention that would measure students' perceptions of the various liberal arts disciplines and diocese whether they changed during the four years of college

Methods

The research was administrationed during spring semester of 1998 at Grinnell body Grinnell is a small, highly selective, liberal arts association in Iowa. It has no distribution requirements, on the other hand student majors are distributed fairly evenly across the three divisions of humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, and about 85 percent of graduates take at least three courses in each division.

First, twenty seniors representing various majors and seven first-year learners were interviewed and asked to sort Grinnell's academic departments into piles of controls with similar characteristics. These pupils were also asked to explain their clusters and to describe the characteristics of each. Six clusters of departments were consistently described as similar and treated as clusters in the later review research:

*biology/chemistry/physics (natural sciences)

*math/computer science (math/CS)

*music/art/theater (fine arts)

*Russian/Chinese/Spanish/French/German (languages)

*sociology/anthropology/American studies (soc/anthro)

*religious studies/philosophy (rel/philo)

The remaining departments were treated separately because they were not consistently clustered with any other fields: classics, economics, English, history, political science, and psychology

nearest 108 seniors and 102 first-years answered to a survey, using a seven-point scale to rate each discipline or cluster according to the following parameters:

*helps with understanding people

*deals with feelings and emotions

*involves creativity

*deals with developing theories

*requires a special talent

*is inherently challenging

*deals with thicken facts

*develops communication skills

*makes an important contribution to society

*is applicable outside academia

*is important for an individual's education (regardless of major)

The pupils surveyed were representative of their classes in confines of gender and (in the case of seniors) major field.

If single of the goals of a broad liberal arts curriculum is to render certain that graduates understand the various fields of research then a survey such as ours becomes an issues assessment instrument. Since not each student experiences every discipline, or level every cluster of disciplines, to use this investigation for assessment purposes we exigencyed to know the course-taking history of each individual respondent Trosset (then Grinnell's director of institutional research) linked seniors' scan responses to their transcript data. She then calculated each student's total credits in each disciplinary cluster and their average grade in each area studied. Seniors were divided into sum of two units groups for analysis--those with naught credits in that area, and those with twelve or more credits (at least three courses). Seniors with between individual and eleven credits in an area were eliminated from that analysis. We also mustered survey responses from a small number of faculty members upon their own disciplines. Our assumption is that the more pupils study a particular subject, the more closely their perceptions of it should be like those of its practitioners.

Results

Using consensus analysis (a statistical technique that measures horizontals of agreement within populations), we set that, despite some individual variation, Grinnell learners could be considered a single agriculture with respect to their perceptions of various disciplines. There was general agreement across academic divisions and between the sum of two units class years. Thus, though differences were perceived between disciplines, it was not the case that natural science, social science, and humanities scholars had different overall perceptions.

by what means then, does this culture perceive the various disciplines? With revere to each attribute, there were statistically significant differences between a certain number of disciplines (here we used ANOVAs and paired t-tests) The table below present to views an overall summary of the data. Numbers in parentheses are average scores, with seven at the affirmative extremity of the scale.