Millersville University, Faculty Senate

General Education Curriculum

Program Review

May 1996

II. Quality of the Program

B. Faculty

1. Composition of the Millersville Faculty

The faculty at Millersville consists of 324 regular full time faculty, 23 regular part time faculty and 80 temporary (full or part time) faculty. The distribution of faculty appointments by department are given in Table A. Seventy-seven percent of the regular full-time faculty members have earned doctorates. Faculty teaching assignments are determined within each department. Faculty members are not specifically assigned to or excluded from teaching courses in the general education curriculum. Hence, most general education courses are taught by regular faculty. There is no subset of faculty reserved for general education courses.

Table A
1995 Faculty Appointments By Department

DepartmentRegular Full TimeRegular Part Time Temporary Full/Part Time
Art1211
Biology1907
Business Administration1407
Chemistry1110
Communications/Theater1214
Computer Science702
Counseling and Human Development400
Developmental Studies601
Earth Science911
Economics601
Educational Foundations1529
Elementary & Early Childhood Education190 5
English2347
Foreign Languages1305
Geography600
Health and Physical Education1302
History1204
Industry and Technology1803
Library1200
Mathematics1824
Music1154
Nursing522
Philosophy500
Physics710
Political Science700
Psychology2103
Social Work412
Sociology/Anthropology824
Special Education702

2. Faculty Development

Faculty workshops have been conducted to assist faculty members in their preparation of new courses to satisfy general education requirements and to revise the presentation of current courses to emphasize the goals of general education. Workshops that have been offered include:

1. Writing across the curriculum workshops
2. Perspectives courses workshops
3. Diversity training
4. Outcomes assessment workshops

The writing across the curriculum workshop has been offered since 1989 one to two times annually. Attendance at these workshops has varied; at this point more than half the regular faculty members have attended. Workshops to prepare perspective courses were offered three different occasions with three different emphases. The first was a ten-day workshop in 1990 (attended by twelve faculty members) with the topic being perspectives courses in general. This was followed by a five-day workshop in 1991 (attended by thirteen faculty members) with the main focus being on courses pertaining to women's studies. The last workshop, offered in 1992 and attended by eleven faculty, had as its main focus courses pertaining to gender and race issues. The diversity workshops have been given once or twice annually since 1993 and at this point in time have included 46 faculty members. These workshops will continue to be offered, with a goal of having all faculty attend.

3. Effect of Fundamentals Courses on Faculty

Composition (English 110) and Fundamentals of Speech (Communications 100) comprise the Fundamentals section of the general education curriculum. Every student is required to take these courses prior to graduation. Since 1988 the English department has increased in size by 7.98 full time faculty positions. The main justifications for the increases were to address the backlog of students waiting to satisfy the English 110 requirement and to service the constant student demand for English 110. The communications department has increased the number of sections of Communications 100 by 9 (1.125 FTE) to service the Fundamentals general education requirement.

4. Faculty Attitudes Toward the General Education Curriculum

During the fall semester of 1992 the faculty were surveyed to assess their attitude toward the current general education requirements. The survey was composed of five sections: 1. fundamentals, 2. significant communication, mathematics or quantitative problem solving, 3. liberal arts core courses, 4. perspectives and 5. general education objectives. There were 183 responses received. A summary of the data revealed the following.

In response to questions about the Fundamentals courses in the general education curriculum, 99.4% of those faculty responding agreed that each student should be required to demonstrate competency in English and 79.0% of those faculty responding agreed that each student should be required to demonstrate competency in the fundamentals of speech. Furthermore, when given the choice of the number of courses to be taken with a significant writing component 50% of the those responding selected 4 (the current requirement). To the question about the number of advance writing courses to be required, 71.7% responded with 1 (the current requirement). In response to the question of what type of requirements should be included in the General Education Curriculum, 60.5% of those answering selected communications, math and quantitative problem solving (which is the current requirement). The majority of the responses regarding the number of courses required for each of the blocks in the liberal arts core again supported the current requirements, which is four courses in each block. In the humanities and fine arts the fraction was 70.6%, in the social sciences 72.2% and in science and mathematics 71.1%. In response to the number of perspectives courses that should be required, 41.5% of the returned surveys indicated 2, while 51.3% of the surveys indicated 0 or 1. The final section of the survey asked for the level of satisfaction as to how the general education curriculum meets each of the 12 general education objectives. For each of the objectives the majority of responses were either satisfied or somewhat satisfied. The percentages of these responses were from 50.5% to 83.8% For more detail refer to Appendix A which contains the relative frequency distributions for each of the questions.

Quality of the Program
...|Design |Student Outcomes |Administration of the General Education Program |Environmental Trends Affecting Program
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