There was significant discussion of historical curricular progression and issues. In the course of this discussion, Bill Martin indicated that there was a clear commitment from the administration to support curricular developments.

This group appeared to agree with the need for writing and presentation skill development and were interested in the COHFE results and perceptions of other faculty. Other general issues that were raised were course load, scheduling problems, and low level of cross-disciplinary exposure of our students. Problems of "separation" and "bulkanization" of students were decried.

The potential for students at Stanford to participate and have in important role in research projects was cited as a model to study. We have room for substantial improvement in the opportunities for substantive work and projects to develop the leadership and intellectual skills of our students. We should take advantage of our size, locale, and other strengths in providing such opportunities. Work load was cited as a significant impediment to participation of this sort. Several models were cited (e.g., 11 week lecture period + 4 week reading period for doing substantive research projects, time between semesters, courses focused on research that take most of 2 semesters).

A discussion of freshman seminars indicated interest, but stressed the need for incentives and support for faculty involvement. If we do freshman seminars, we must do it seriously, have sufficient choices, understand the expense and training that would be necessary. A discussion of the potential role for post-doctoral teaching fellows indicated that this approach might be applied to this setting for the writing aspects.

The best way to get writing experience for our students is for faculty teaching content to incorporate writing into the courses. (Resource: University of Michigan had a writing program to make explicit the forms of knowledge and forms of expression in different disciplines).

Fragmentation of student body, the absence of common experience on which to build were not perceived to be addressed/solved by freshman, however. With regard to numeracy, there was strong support for exposure, but how to do it was unclear. How do we make sense of the world? How are we sure about what we read, what's real, what's crap? Must have the quantitative reasoning skills, but how these are linked into a curriculum is less clear.

Everyone that graduates from Rice should be capable of critical thinking, both verbally and numerically. It would be best if students also were able to understand the basic operations of science, to acquire new/exciting aspects of science at the lay critical level (as opposed to expert).

Ethical reasoning was discussed in some detail. Perhaps we could develop an interdisciplinary course that links writing, quantitative reasoning, and ethical reasoning with societal relevance.

What's missing in this mixture is cross-cultural exposure. Columbia has a program, "Science, Technology, and Society" that may address some of these issues. It is a study of a specific issue to put it in a context of understanding the values, assumptions, ethics, etc. Whatever we do with science should be concept- vs content-driven.

Support for maintaining teaching of the discipline will be required for generating involvement of the faculty.