Designing and mapping a generic attributes curriculum for science undergraduate students: a faculty-wide collaborative project

Abstract

Our project took a faculty-wide approach to mapping the teaching of GAs across the Schools contributing to the BSc. An initiative at the School of Music at the University of Queensland demonstrates the power of such an approach for improving students’ learning outcomes (Bath, Smith, Stein and Swann 2004). That School went beyond the required mapping and embedding of their university’s graduate attributes to an on-going cycle of review, reflection and renewal of their graduate attributes curriculum based on evidence from student and staff surveys. However, many of the perceived barriers to implementation of a generic attributes curriculum, such as questions of duplication of teaching, need to be addressed across programs rather than within disciplines. Our project aims were: • to develop Faculty-specific exemplars for the University’s GAs; • to facilitate School-level reflection on how the University’s GAs could be interpreted in a discipline-specific context, and thus, • to develop discipline-specific exemplars of the generic GAs; • to develop a GA curriculum for each discipline/major; and • to map current teaching against that curriculum as a basis for curriculum review.