Page 42 - FSTE A5 Handbook

Chapter Two
Common Core Requirements at the
UGC-funded Universities

Intended Learning Outcomes of UGC-funded Curricula and the Mapping to the
Related Categories of Knowledge

Most GE curriculum designers would agree that the goals of GE do not merely focus on “what
students need to know” but more so on “what students need to know and be able to do” upon
their completion of university study (Weissman & Boning, 2003). As mentioned above, GE
objectives are not the same as GE learning outcomes. To study the similarities and mapping
its intended learning outcomes across universities, a conceptual framework developed by
Kereluik and her colleagues (2013) has been adopted to analyse the GE curricula of the eight
universities.

The above mentioned categorization of the GEILOs of local degree institutes was performed by
two Fulbright scholars from another QEGS project “Models on Sub-degree General Education
Curriculum and Exemplary General Education Courses” in November 2013. The name of each
university was kept anonymous by the experts to help avoid bias and they were asked to
carry out the task individually for validity testing. They were given a list of randomly arranged
learning outcomes and were asked to map each learning outcome to a list of subcategory(ies)
based on the Kereluik Framework. Only those subcategories that both experts agreed would
be counted for further analysis (about 57% of the subcategories were cross verified). With
the help of SPSS software, the results were analysed and presented in the following sections.

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