Tuning into General Education: Understanding Student Experience in Undergraduate Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
General Education is a program that is generally defined as “the home for a well-rounded education that nurtures skills in communication, numeracy, and critical thinking” (Furman, 2013, p. 130) in post-secondary education. The purpose of this research was to investigate how students experience learning and living within a university in Western Canada that has structured all of its degree programs around General Education. Following case study methodology (Merriam, 2009), data was collected through multiple avenues, including: the review of four institutional and curricular documents, four semi-structured interviews with university faculty, and an online survey and three focus group interviews with current and graduated students. Interpretation of the data was guided by a hermeneutic lens (Smith, 2006), revealing that the student experience of General Education at this university is fundamentally experimental in nature, resulting in great divergences of experiences and understandings of the program. Students experience General Education as both transformative and hermeneutic, challenging and overcoming previously held assumptions and prejudices. Other participants, however, report their experiences as frustrating, irrelevant to their education, and interfering with their core studies. This study’s findings are significant in several respects, including providing the first investigation of a General Education program situated in a Canadian institutional context. These findings can further provide deeper insights into the tensions and incongruities that exist between the philosophical aims of General Education programs and how they are experienced by the students they are meant to serve.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".