Teaching Lesson Hits Home at UCSD : Education: The university, known for research, is now putting more emphasis on improving quality of undergraduate classes.

Music undergraduates at UC San Diego told their department that they wanted more chances to know professors and learn about cutting-edge ideas.

That same message asking for more personal contact with professors came across to the engineering faculty in surveys of their 1,500 undergraduate majors.

It’s long been on the minds of top UCSD administrators, who read the annual student evaluations of courses and professors that perennially note the lack of personal contact with faculty in many classes and departments while complimenting overall teaching quality.

The same is true not just at UCSD or at other UC campuses. Across the nation, prestigious public research universities have been under attack from politicians and parents upset at what they feel is too cavalier an attitude toward undergraduate teaching.

Beginning this fall, departments all across UCSD’s academic spectrum will make a major stab at improving their efforts for undergraduates.

Some examples:

* In the division of engineering, lower-level required courses will be offered to students throughout the academic year instead of once a quarter, with the effect of reducing large class sizes that now can number in the hundreds. The faculty will teach a greater variety of smaller upper-division courses, increasing the chances of students getting to know professors better. Some of the best students will have the chance to sign up for graduate-level seminars.

* In music, professors will devote time weekly during the 10-week winter quarter to a new undergraduate seminar where they will talk informally with students about their latest research and ask for their participation in special projects.

* In anthropology, professors will take the best class writings of undergraduates and help the students hone them into papers for a new department journal.

* At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, for the first time since UCSD was founded in 1960, professors will teach undergraduates in a sustained way as part of a new major in earth sciences.

The dozens and dozens of plans are UCSD’s response to a UC systemwide initiative in undergraduate education promulgated last year by outgoing President David Gardner. The plans of all UC campuses are due in the president’s office Wednesday.

But the UCSD response also reflects the evolution of individual ideas and concerns over several years into a critical mass of improvements.

“We’re not saying by any means that we have done a terrible job and now suddenly are mending our ways,” Marjorie Caserio, UCSD vice chancellor for academic affairs, said.

“But we recognize that quality does suffer to some extent when you deny a student access to faculty in an intimate, Socratic level,” she said.

The university’s record with undergraduates is better than those at many other campuses, Douglas Smith, professor biology and longtime member of UCSD academic planning committees, said. That is due, in part, to UCSD’s smaller size than many public universities--about 14,000 students--and, in part, to its assignment of students to one of five colleges, which offer specialized courses for its members, he said.

Students at UCSD in general have few problems enrolling in the classes they want or in graduating within a reasonable amount of time--about 4 1/2 years at UCSD. And, during the past five years, more than 80% of undergraduates have expressed satisfaction with their courses, even with the large introductory science and humanities offerings with upward of 200 students.

“But there’s always room for improvement, and so (the Gardner initiative) presented a good opportunity to re-examine what is on the books,” Smith said.

The months of discussions both within and between departments have touched on ways to shrink lecture courses, expand the numbers of freshmen seminars, encourage better teaching through peer review and increased merit awards, and to alter the image of academic research and teaching as incompatible functions. All are intended to bring the close contact traditionally considered a benchmark of a first-class liberal arts education.

“The entire campus has been energized,” James Lyon, professor of literature and provost of Fifth College, said. Lyon procured a major Ford Foundation grant several years ago to create innovative undergraduate courses.

Joseph Pasquale, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, won his department’s teaching award this year, an honor bestowed by his colleagues. In his course on computer operating systems, Pasquale scrapped lectures in exchange for the “Socratic method,” where he guided the classroom discussion through a series of questions posed for students at random.

“I asked students to come prepared ahead of time by reading technical papers from various journals and conferences, and then used the questions to move the class in certain directions,” Pasquale said. “In that way, I could bring out the subtleties of ideas that are difficult to understand just from the readings.”

Initially, his method of picking a student’s name from a deck of shuffled index cards set shivers of panic through the class.

“They feared embarrassing themselves in front of their peers by being forced to think on the spot,” Pasquale said. “They don’t have a lot of experience in volunteering their views, and they were very, very nervous. I’m still trying to figure out how to get them to relax” earlier in the course.

Pasquale found, however, that students did interact more outside of class with him and among themselves than they would have done based on standard lecture presentations.

“It still didn’t happen during my official office hours, but rather in walking back to the office,” Pasquale said. “They would wind up talking about some interesting tangent to the class discussion that, in itself, was unexpected to me.

“Both faculty and students have to work at this very hard, because students feel intimidated based on past classroom experiences. So I try to be very aggressive from the get-go to get them to venture into unknown territory.”

Many departments are expanding their seminar offerings--both for freshman and sophomores, and for upperclassmen with declared majors--as a key way to promote the hoped-for interaction.

“I find few students will come to office hours just to talk because they’re nervous that I’ll think they’re wasting my time,” said Roy D’Andrade, chair of the anthropology department and a popular professor with Fifth College students in their “Making of the Modern World” course.

“That’s why the small seminars are so good because students find out that a professor does talk and act like other people, and that they can develop a relationship” based on shared interests. D’Andrade said his anthropology colleagues have decided that a mix of large and small courses, rather than a uniform number of medium-size classes, will present students with more chances to interact.

The physics department began a two-year lower-division course this year specifically for the 50 or so students who annually plan to major in the field as a vehicle to promote camaraderie and sense of excitement.

“The transfer of knowledge is easier, the inhibitions of students are less, and there is simply a more lively, interactive format,” said Prof. Brian Maple, who taught the first two quarters of the specialized course.

“In a large lecture, it is simply impossible to know more than the handful of students who will come up and ask questions.”

Not only did Maple have more time for lab demonstrations and questions from students, “I was able to talk with them about what it is like to be a physicist, what it is like to do research, and what my colleagues are doing that they might be interested in.”

The department also will offer two new bachelors of arts degrees in physics--one for potential high-school teachers and one in general physics--that are less specialized than the existing bachelor of science degree intended for students who want to pursue post-graduate work. It is hoped that the BA degrees will attract students now turned off by a degree designed for those wanting careers in academic physics, said Prof. Thomas O’Neil, director of the department’s undergraduate education program.

All of the planned improvements must be done without extra funds, cautioned Caserio, the vice chancellor for academic affairs, particularly in light of possible budget cuts of 10% or more facing the UC system for the next year.

While undergraduate education is less expensive for the system than the per-student graduate cost, the lack of new money means professors must juggle the increased attention with ongoing requirements of research, graduate teaching and community service.

“The reward mechanism for good teaching is not there yet,” said Pasquale, who won his department’s teaching award. “Most professors feel a responsibility to do a good job and I certainly don’t do it because I will get some reward.

“This is still a research institution, and so I will, or I will not get tenure because of (a lack of) published papers, not because of my teaching. So I have tried to design my teaching to help my research, to have good ideas come out of interactions.”

And, Pasquale is no slouch when it comes to research. He won a five-year Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989 from the National Science Foundation, a prestigious honor.

The merit structure will have to change before a better equilibrium can sustain itself between research and teaching, said Smith of the biology department.

‘It is a very important underlying foundation for implementing the (teaching) initiative,” Smith said. “There are changes under way (systemwide) for greater recognition in the reward process for teaching as opposed to strictly creative scholarship.

“If professors realize that they will get rewards for devoting more their time to teaching, then there will be a greater inclination to do so.”

Indeed, UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson, while he has a reputation for emphasizing research, has co-authored an article in the latest issue of Change magazine arguing for more recognition of teaching.

Atkinson, along with co-author Donald Tuzin, a UCSD anthropology professor, suggested a flexible merit system where “faculty (could) move more freely between teaching and research.

Professors in the department of applied mechanics and engineering sciences will try peer review beginning in September as an experiment to find a consensus on how merit awards for teaching will be handed out.

“It’s very controversial, especially in how to do fairly, but we were unanimous in wanting to see if we can make it work,” said Prof. David Miller, the department’s chairman. Without faculty trust in a system of evaluation, there will be reluctance to accept a bigger role for teaching in the merit process, he said.

“So we’re going to be sending professors into their colleagues’ classes to see what happens.

“But I do think that people are deadly serious this time in considering teaching more seriously when making promotions and merits.”