STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES OF EACH BRIDGE PROPOSAL
As seen by the Psychology Department
Learning Communities (LC)
This proposal is the most radical shift from our current system, potentially leading to
quite a bit of confusion among faculty, staff, and students. We are concerned about the
cost of the paired courses and how they would be counted in load. The team-taught
courses, although intriguing in principle, have the potential for a lack of consistency and
consistent quality, and the planning associated with these courses could be quite timeintensive. There would also be difficulty with assessing each individual teacher’s
performance in the classroom (i.e., course-teacher evaluations). As for the impact on
The Psychology department specifically, the distributed nature of the Gen Ed
requirements could cause very serious sequencing problems, as it necessitates
insertion of an additional course (Ethics) into our 220-221-494 sequence. The change
in Social Science Introductory course requirements has the potential to drastically
reduce the number of PSYC 111 sections needed. We see this reduction as having two
negative effects. First, this affects our ability to expose SIUE students to the broad and
important field of Psychology. Second, this would greatly diminish the number of
students available to participate in research in our department (through the PSYC 111
participant pool). This research pool is vital to the completion of our students’ Senior
Assignment projects, as well as our students’ undergraduate Honors and Master’s
theses, and faculty research.
Integrated Core (IC)
Our concerns with the proposal were similar to the LC in terms of the use of paired
courses. Also, this proposal involves Integrated Liberal Arts and Science courses
instead of typical discipline-specific Introductory courses, so it also has the potential to
drastically reduce PSYC 111 enrollment, leading to the negative consequences
described earlier.
Distribution (D)
This proposal was strongly favored by the Department of Psychology for several
reasons. First, it is considerably less radical in terms of the change in student/faculty
experience. Second, we appreciated the breadth and flexibility it offers students, and
believe that would benefit our student body. The foundations courses are similar to
what we currently have, such as a required Speech Communications course, which we
favor. Because the plan allows more student choice, it will help with major exploration.
Finally, this plan leaves the PSYC 111 course as one of several Social Science courses
from which all students can choose to fulfill Gen Ed requirements.