Significant gaps in career readiness and skill development exist among incoming WashU undergraduate students, particularly for first-generation college students and those from under-resourced backgrounds. WashU aspires to cultivate a distinctly WashU educational experience that enables every student to navigate a rapidly changing world effectively.
The Undergraduate Education Initiative at WashU seeks to transform the undergraduate experience by fostering shared academic foundations, integrated co-curricular learning, purpose-driven leadership development, and leveraging data insights to enhance excellence in teaching and learning.
Shared Academic Foundations
This initiative seeks to establish shared academic foundations that enhance and align students’ educational experiences across all schools and majors. In practice, this involves creating a cohesive framework of core skills—that all students are expected to master, regardless of their major: • Communication Dexterity • Creativity and Innovation • Quantitative and Computation These skills were developed over time by a cross-university working group. Efforts are currently underway to assess all undergraduate courses and conduct a landscape assessment of where these skills are already introduced and/or reinforced.
Co-Curricular Innovation and Purpose Driven Leadership Development
To create a truly distinctive WashU Educational Experience, efforts must take place to align the learning that happens in the classroom with the learning that happens outside of the classroom. Three additional skills – that exist alongside the three skills outlined for curricular innovation- were identified: • Working and Learning Across Discipline and Difference • Civic and Global Engagement • Collaboration and Leadership In addition to assessing where these skills are embedded in the existing curriculum, efforts are underway to develop tools that help students reflect on and connect the skills they gain through extracurricular experiences—such as clubs, internships, and workshops—with those developed in the classroom. Another key element is the partnership with WashU Leads, which integrates its work in developing purpose-driven leaders into this initiative’s model of integrating the learning that takes place both in and out of the classroom. This holistic approach not only enhances student development but also reinforces WashU’s commitment to producing responsible citizens prepared to make meaningful impacts in the world.
Leveraging Data Insights to Enhance Excellence in Teaching and Learning
Members of the Provost Office’s Institutional Effectiveness Team have developed the “STEM Feedback Loop” to systematically collect and analyze student performance metrics in select STEM courses. This process helps identify strengths and areas for improvement in teaching practices. By leveraging this data, faculty can refine their instructional methods and curricular offerings to better support student learning. Additionally, a key goal is to develop a prototype for department-level reports on student outcomes, including who expressed interest in a particular major, who declared the major, who persisted, who left, where they went, and whether specific experiences—such as particularly challenging courses—correlated with students leaving the major.
(RACETRACK MODEL HERE)