Towards complementarity and curricular improvements of the courses on strategies for personal development, freshmen orientation seminar, and understanding the self

Abstract

Delivering quality instruction is fundamental in any educational institution and, this calls for a teacher sense of responsibility. Teachers create their instructional designs for specific courses and ensure that resources are available to achieve learning objectives. However, some instructional designs of several courses appear to be containing similar components, including contents; hence, this study evaluated three courses. These courses include Understanding the Self (UTS C101), a new general education subject in college is believed to be overlapping in terms of content with Strategies for Personality Development (PD), a course in Senior High School (SHS) and Freshmen Orientation Seminar (FOS 101), a unique course taken by freshmen college students in a private university in the Philippines. Since the courses are reputed to be related and presumed intertwined in terms of curricular content, the researchers embarked on a comparative-document analysis using the syllabus containing lessons, teaching methodologies, and student assessment methods. The findings showed an array of similarities and differences of lessons taught, learning activities, student learning assessment strategies, and other pedagogical methods used. The results have direct implications for the University to be able to foster curricular improvements and ensure complementarity between and among the three courses explored. This is also in response to the challenges brought by outcomes-based education, which was newly integrated as an educational framework in the University. A policy recommendation for the University was initiated based on the results of this study.