An analysis of interviews, focus-group discussions, assessment instruments, and assignment prompts revealed that within general education, faculty assessed critical thinking as faceted using methods and criteria that varied epistemically across disciplines. Faculty approaches were misaligned with discipline-general institutional approaches.…

The University of California-Merced's Core 1 has potential to foster genuine interdisciplinary thinking by asking students to conceptualize knowledge across fields of inquiry. Core 1 introduces students to the range of scholarly inquiry at the university all in the span of one semester-long, writing-intensive, integrated curriculum that…

The dominant model of university education featuring one-way communication in a desocialized setting that celebrates competition is fundamentally at odds with the evolutionarily attuned attributes of the human brain. Quest University Canada represents an alternative of engaged, collaborative learning that builds on the eusocial nature of our…

The purpose of a general education program is to produce generally well-educated adults who can function as informed citizens and engage in the popular intellectual debates of their time. The skills and frames of reference that are necessary for thoughtful, independent opinions are themselves the objects of debate, but there are points of…

A liberal arts environment invites the expansion of one's understanding of himself/herself and the world by exposing him/her to multiple disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. For its part, the topic of "narrative" is intrinsically interdisciplinary and, as such, can be explored to particular advantage within a liberal arts…

This essay argues for the importance of quantitative reasoning skills as part of a liberal education and describes the successful introduction of a mathematics-based quantitative skills course at a small Canadian university. Today's students need quantitative problem-solving skills, to function as adults, professionals, consumers, and citizens in…

The notion of interdisciplinarity in higher education raises significant questions about the very nature of knowledge and knowing. Are there fundamental knowledge bases associated with particular disciplines that cannot be understood through interdisciplinary teaching and learning? Or is there a common knowledge base across the disciplines that…

This article reports a study that examines the efforts of one school--Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania--to improve student writing in first-year learning communities by promoting so-called process-based writing pedagogy outside of writing classes. Administrators encouraged instructors of subject-matter classes to integrate the…

Baxter Magolda's Learning Partnerships model was used to create a program designed to foster student epistemological development. To assess its effectiveness, the Measure of Epistemological Reflection was administered to the experimental cohort and a comparable group in the traditional general education program. Results indicate that the model…

Many universities positively impact student retention rates by aligning state competencies and undergraduate coursework with specific learning outcomes known to contribute to success. Faculty from teaching and nursing conducted interdisciplinary focus group research to gather student perceptions concerning whether skills obtained through core…

The purpose of health education is to positively influence the health behavior of individuals and communities, as well as living and working conditions that affect health. The goal of a Healthy Lifestyles course that is offered to undergraduate students enrolled in a university general education program (e.g., liberal arts education, core…

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has reformed its undergraduate curriculum to create connections across disciplines and advance efforts to internationalize its campus. As a result, global issues, experiential learning, study abroad, and international course clusters have become an integral part of a curriculum that emphasizes…

Teacher Student relationship;This article examines the relationship between interdisciplinary curriculum and student outcomes. In this inquiry, the author uses data collected during a two-year ethnographic study of six courses in a general education reform at Southwestern University (all names are pseudonyms), a research university with a diverse…

Are the humanities relevant enough to the average undergraduate to be included as a required part of a general education program? The University of Idaho (UI) is currently ten years into the challenge of implementing a cross-disciplinary, university-wide general education program--the UI Core--that has the attention, if not always the support, of…

After describing our interdisciplinary humanities course and its history, we identify challenges these courses face and strategies for keeping them vigorous. We argue that course longevity depends on effective translation of vision and content into explicit goals bridging the gaps between faculty members and between faculty and students. (Contains…