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A group of faculty members teaching in the School of Management undergraduate core has been meeting since the middle of the fall on a project to examine the ways in which the courses in the core contribute to the development of students' skills. The goal of the exercise is to understand (for our internal process of improvement) and subsequently be able to demonstrate (to our external audiences) how the undergraduate core curriculum supports development of the skills the faculty has identified as learning outcomes for undergraduate students.
We hope to use the understanding we gain to spread skills development out across the curriculum and bring more consistency and coherence to the core, including across sections of the same course. The best student learning happens when skills are practiced consistently over time. A large body of anecdotal evidence from students (along the lines of: "I did so much writing freshman year, and I haven't written a paper since-my writing is really getting rusty." "I haven't done a team project for two semesters and now I have five of them. I spend most of my time just trying to schedule meetings.") suggests that this is not systematically happening in our curriculum. We can improve our students' learning by more careful attention to how we support their skills development over time.
We have roughed out a web site (http://sominfo.syr.edu/facstaff/snhurd/web-skills_site/skillschart.htm) that creates a grid of core courses and skills. The strategy is for the faculty teaching those courses or in that area to locate the skills in the various courses and articulate how the skill is being developed: for example, what specific assignments support the skill, how are they constructed, how are they evaluated, what importance they have in the course, etc. That information will be posted on the web site-SOM 122 is already posted as an example. Once we have all of the information in place, we can begin to talk as a group about what we know and how we can best use that information to support the goal of the project.