Introduction: Educational Effectiveness Approach

The Berkeley Context

The history and tradition at UC Berkeley have long been to hire the very best faculty and nurture them to become preeminent in their chosen fields. The campus culture is built on two core strengths that distinguish us from many of our peer institutions. First, Berkeley has not historically used the “star system” approach in hiring faculty; we typically hire at the junior level and “grow our own” (Weinstein, 2002). For every new hire who meets the University’s standards for excellence, a tenured position is available. As a testament to the success of this culture, 80-85% of faculty who come up for tenure in a given year are awarded tenure. Second, Berkeley is known for its strong faculty governance and the crucial role the faculty Academic Senate plays in establishing educational policy and evaluating educational effectiveness. The Preparatory Review Visiting Team concurred with this view, identifying effective faculty leadership as one of the institution’s key strengths. In particular, the Academic Senate Budget Committee, which reviews and makes recommendations in all merit, tenure, and promotion cases, plays a central role in maintaining uniformly high standards of quality for the institution.

This culture of investing in individual faculty has historically served us well, as our reputation as the leading public university attests. In graduate program rankings, Berkeley ranks first nationally in the number of programs that place in the top ten in their fields. The faculty includes eight Nobel laureates, 19 MacArthur Fellows, 122 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 86 members of the National Academy of Engineering, and three Pulitzer Prize winners, in addition to recipients of other honors and awards. These markers of excellence in research and graduate training, however, overshadow indicators of excellence in teaching and undergraduate education—a common observation about major research universities (Boyer Commission, 1998).

The Berkeley tradition has also resulted in a highly decentralized and entrepreneurial campus culture, which affects many aspects of campus life, including governance, decision making, curriculum, requirements, and the services provided to students, faculty, and staff. Departments often play the most critical role in faculty hiring, teaching workload, and undergraduate curriculum. An advantage of this approach is that it recognizes and responds to the unique contexts of various disciplines. The disadvantages are a risk of unnecessary duplication and a lack of uniform metrics that would allow us to make comparisons across departments and to assess the educational effectiveness of the institution as a whole. The Preparatory Review Visiting Team observed the many “pockets of excellence” across the campus and the difficulty in “scaling up” to a more integrated University vision.

The challenge for the campus has been to respond effectively to the shortcomings of this decentralized culture, while preserving what is best about it. In recent years, the campus has begun to develop more centralized structures, which cross unit “silos,” in order to respond to campus priorities. An example is the e-Berkeley initiative, a centralized administrative mechanism for bringing the power of technology to campus administrative and academic operations. Such centralized approaches are particularly important now, at a time of shrinking resources and expanding enrollment, when the campus needs to develop a strategic vision for the future.

One aspect of this new vision is the Chancellor’s decision to make undergraduate education a key campus priority. In 2001, a senior administrative position was created and charged with campus-wide oversight for undergraduate education. The new Vice Provost has established a strong partnership with the Academic Senate, particularly the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP), which is charged with review of undergraduate programs. In addition, the Vice Provost has created the Council of Undergraduate Deans (CUD), which consists of the senior administrator in charge of undergraduate education in each of the five colleges and in those professional schools with undergraduate programs. In response to its charge to play a central planning role for undergraduate education, CUD has drafted an initial statement of the outcomes that the campus wants its students to achieve during their Berkeley experience. These outcomes include the self-confidence to engage new bodies of knowledge and to develop new skills; the imagination to conceptualize and the self-discipline to follow through on a major complex project; the ability to encounter challenges and find creative solutions; and the capacity to cope with ambiguity, think flexibly and grow intellectually throughout life.

For the Educational Effectiveness Review, we have chosen undergraduate education as our major focus. We begin by identifying how we plan to achieve our goals for students, both in a new model for undergraduate research (the hallmark of a Berkeley education) and in new models for teaching the core lower-division curriculum. We also address how the campus is promoting a culture of excellence in teaching, as well as in research, and how all of these developments are being incorporated into the primary campus mechanism for accountability, the academic program review. We have used the self-study process to reflect candidly on obstacles and challenges facing us, as well as on our strengths, and to help establish campus priorities with regard to improving undergraduate education that will have benefits and uses beyond accreditation.

Approach to the Educational Effectiveness Review

The Educational Effectiveness Report was prepared in accordance with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) 2001 Handbook of Accreditation and UC Berkeley’s Institutional Proposal. In structuring the report, we chose the special themes model, which allows analysis of educational effectiveness in relation to several focused topics of investigation. The process of refining and focusing those essay topics to align them with campus priorities has been an integral component of this review process.

In our Institutional Proposal, we identified three broad areas for investigation in the Educational Effectiveness Review: (1) enhancing academic engagement at a large public research university; (2) rethinking the delivery of education; and (3) improving undergraduate program review. The Academic Engagement Working Group and the Delivery of Education Working Group were established to address the first two topics. These groups were chaired by faculty members and composed of faculty, students (graduate and undergraduate), and staff. For the third topic, Program Review, the campus made use of the existing Academic Program Review Working Group, a joint Academic Senate/administration committee that had been charged separately by the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, but whose work overlapped with the WASC self-study. The Steering Committee, consisting of the chairs of each of the Working Groups, members of the Academic Senate, and key administrators involved in the WASC process, oversaw the self-study process, and a Distinguished Advisory Group provided additional input.

The Working Groups were convened in January 2002. Over the next year and a half, the groups examined a wide range of potential topics for investigation under the broad rubrics laid out in the Institutional Proposal. Each of the Working Groups presented a series of proposals to the Steering Committee for possible topics that would be worthy of more focused investigation. Each proposed topic was evaluated based on the following criteria. First, we considered its relationship to one or more of the objectives laid out in our institutional proposal. (These were (1) increasing opportunities for faculty-student interaction, especially for lower-division and transfer students; (2) increasing opportunities for capstone experiences; (3) optimizing teaching resources to enhance educational quality and student learning; and (4) helping instructors teach with excellence.) Second, we assessed whether it would allow us to leverage existing campus efforts already under way. Third, we asked whether the topic had campus-wide scope and would help bring a broad institutional perspective to bear on a challenge related to undergraduate education.

At the end of this process of review and selection, the Steering Committee approved four topics for inclusion in the final report:

• Preparing Students for Successful Capstone Experiences
• Reinventing Large-Enrollment Courses
• Enhancing the Culture of Teaching
• Improving Academic Program Review

In approaching these topics, each of the Working Groups considered the rationale for the importance of the topic; the specific goals and objectives the campus would like to achieve; the identification of several case examples that demonstrate educational effectiveness and, to the extent possible, have addressed learning outcomes; the identification of key challenges; and, finally, a set of core recommendations for the future. This proposed structure was vetted with the Preparatory Review Visiting Team in October 2002, and was adopted as the basic structure for the essays that follow. In addition, the Working Groups considered three questions raised by the Preparatory Review Visiting Team:

• How best can we bring greater coherence to existing efforts in the priority areas?
• What evidence are faculty and programs marshaling to evaluate their successes?
• How does the presence of diversity serve as an important resource for student learning?

In the next section, we include the four essays developed by the Working Groups, together with a set of exhibits designed to provide more detailed evidence of educational effectiveness organized around the chosen topics. In our conclusion, we consider some of the common cross-cutting issues that emerged in this investigation, discuss some of the areas for continued growth and development, and consider how the institution will move forward to sustain and extend the work undertaken to date.

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