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Faculty Perceptions of General Education and the Use of High-Impact Practices

The Association of American Colleges and Universities' Give Students a Compass project, part of AAC&U s ongoing Liberal Education and Americas Promise (LEAP) initiative, focuses on systems change to advance the use of high-impact practices (HIPs), especially in general education courses and programs. Through the Compass project, campus faculty and other academic leaders at nine institutions in three state systems - Wisconsin, Oregon, and the California State University - have worked to map expected student learning outcomes, deployed high- impact practices that help students achieve the intended outcomes, and adopted educationally meaningful assessment strategies for general education reform and implementation. As part of the national project, staff at AAC&U and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) created a faculty survey to garner input about the underlying assumptions of the Compass project, as well as the intended outcomes of the project.System-level administrators at Compass institutions provided feedback and supplied questions they hoped to have addressed on the faculty survey. After multiple rounds of review, a final list of common questions was agreed upon. Allowing for some individual modification, seven Compass institutions administered surveys between November 2010 and December 2011.RESPONDENT CHARACTERISTICSThe majority of those who responded to the survey (87 percent) were primarily faculty or instructional staff with 56 percent of the respondents being full-time, tenure-track faculty members. Respondents came from humanities and the arts (28 percent), professions and applied sciences (26 percent), social sciences (21 percent), and natural sciences (12 percent). The largest group of respondents teaches both lower and upper-division undergraduates (45 percent) . An additional 27 percent teach primarily upper-division undergraduates, 14 percent lower- division undergraduates, and 11 percent primarily to graduate students. Because the survey was about general education, respondents were asked to characterize their home departments based on how many general education courses were offered. Nearly 40 percent came from departments that offer many general education courses, with 35 percent in departments that offered a few general education courses and 21 percent in departments that did not offer any general education courses.LIMITATIONSOne major limitation of the survey is the low response rate of 12.2 percent. People who respond to surveys can usually be categorized as either extremely positive or extremely negative about the subject matter. In results from surveys with low response rates the likelihood is that responses gathered came from these two ends of the spectrum with the silent majority in the middle. On this survey, the difference is clearly seen in responses about whether there was a strong desire to improve general education for them as individuals, and in their departments, institutions and systems. Nearly 70 percent of respondents agreed that they had a strong desire to improve general education, but their perceptions were considerably lower for their departments (43 percent), institutions (44 percent), and systems (32 percent). Clearly respondents perceive themselves to be more engaged on the topic of general education than typical for their institutions.Another limitation of the survey is the balance that had to be struck in order to ask the questions that needed to be asked but to keep the survey a manageable length. Even after cutting multiple questions, the survey was still long (twenty-four questions, many with multiple items), which would also contribute to a lower response rate. In addition, some questions were double barreled, meaning that they asked about two similar but perhaps not completely distinct ideas such as "teamwork and problem-solving skills," which technically are two different activities but in the survey are treated as a single topic. …