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First Seminars in Fall 2007
As the university welcomes the largest entering class in its history, SAGES is offering more than 70 First Seminars. In addition to seminars bearing the common title "Life of the Mind," this year's offerings include 31 topical First Seminars, ranging from "Social Policy and Poverty" to "The Greek Hero and Heroic Culture" to "Archaeoastronomy." From these choices, entering students identify the eight First Seminars that interest them most, and SAGES honors their preferences as faithfully as possible in creating the course rosters.
This is the second year in which entering students have been invited to say which First Seminars they would like to take. When this system was introduced in fall 2006, it helped produce a substantial improvement in students' evaluations of their First Seminar experiences, as compared with evaluation results from fall 2005.
University Seminars
Student evaluations of University Seminars have been consistently strong. In spring 2007, the Office of Undergraduate Studies compared the average ratings that students gave to various categories of courses across the university. As a group, University Seminars were among the highest-ranked courses.
Recognition for SAGES' Commitment to Oral Communication Skills
- SAGES' approach to building students' oral communications skills is highlighted in a new report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Assessment in Cycles of Improvement: Faculty Designs for Essential Learning Outcomes describes how selected colleges and universities "foster and assess student learning in twelve liberal education outcome areas, including writing, quantitative literacy, critical thinking, ethics, intercultural knowledge, and information literacy."
- In partnership with John Carroll University, SAGES has been awarded a $25,000 planning grant from the Teagle Foundation to develop an assessment of "Effective Approaches to Refining Skills in Oral Communication."
Inaugural Women's Club Awards
In 2006-07, the Case Western Reserve University Women's Club established two awards for students in the SAGES program.
The first recipient of the Women's Club Award for Exemplary Intellectual Contributions in First Seminar was Bhavani Raveendran. Margaretmary Daley, who nominated Bhavani for the award, wrote, "I am confident that her classmates in the seminar would agree that her intellectual presence in the classroom was outstanding, thoughtful, entertaining, and memorable.... Bhavani Raveendran made all of us, her classmates and her professor, think more profoundly about the life of the mind."
The first recipient of the Women's Club Award for a Student Completing an Outstanding Capstone Project was Edgar R. Wilson, a physics major whose capstone was titled "Timing Offset Measurements for the Pierre Auger Observatory."
Writing Portfolios
Once students complete their First and University Seminars, they submit a portfolio with a selection of their seminar papers. William Siebenschuh, one of the evaluators, made these comments about the portfolios he reviewed this summer:
"The vast majority of the portfolios I read were extremely heartening to a former Director of Composition and current chair of the English department. It seemed to me obvious that what we had all theorized is true: three semesters of writing practice and instruction help the students more than one highly concentrated course, however good and however concentrated. I always read the papers in chronological order, and it was a real pleasure to watch the level of control and maturity increase in so many of the portfolios. I also couldn't help but notice and appreciate the sheer variety of subjects the students wrote about and their enthusiasm for topics and subjects in courses they chose themselves. Any writing teacher will tell you that students are always more motivated and engaged when they write about things they're actually interested in and/or care about. Again, I felt I saw a far higher percentage of student writers thus motivated and engaged in their writing over three very different courses than could be possible in a single course.
"Are there things that need improving about the system? Of course.... [M]y impression based on my experience reading portfolios this year is that, where writing is concerned, the high hopes we had for the SAGES program are beginning to be realized. Adjustments need to be made, fine-tuning needs to be done. But the idea is sound and I believe the potential continues to be great."
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