Study On Academic Acquirement Of Undergraduate And University Curriculum

With the mass higher education, more and more students get a diploma. However,getting a diploma does not equal to gaining the academic acquirement. The study on academic acquirement arouses wild attention in academic circles at home and abroad.Academic acquirement is regarded as the key to solving and overcoming the problems of education quality. “Focusing on academic acquirement of university students” and“attaching great importance to university students’ learning quality” is one of the theme of the 2011 National University Learning Reform and Innovation Symposium and National Conference on Science of Learning. The conference clearly stated that“attaching importance to the cultivation of university students’ academic acquirement is the inner demand of improving higher education quality, improving learning quality through academic acquirement provides new ideas for promoting high education quality”. So it can be seen that academic acquirement, learning quality and higher education quality are closely related. Higher education quality includes the talent cultivation quality(learning and development quality of university students), scientific research quality and social services quality, among which talent cultivation quality is the core, while undergraduates’ academic acquirement development is the core of talent cultivation quality. Hence, undergraduates’ academic acquirement development is the most important for higher education quality.The worldwide popularization of the Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education again verified the assertion made by Dr. Stephen.Heyneman, the president of Comparative and International Education Society. He said in 1992, “the crisis of education quality is now universal among all the countries”. As a member of the world’s great powers in higher education, China also fails to survive the crisis, and the quality of higher education is questioned by the public. The president of Yale University, president of Oxford University and the president of East China University of Science and Technology all criticized Chinese undergraduate education for “lacking in thinking training, students cultivated in this education cannot think.” Based on the cognition and thinking, undergraduate academic development has a lower level. The quality of Chinese undergraduate education is lower than that in the United States, according to the research result of NSSE(National Survey of Student Engagement), compared with the top 10% university in the U.S.,Tsinghai University can only compete with them in the campus environment, while for another four indicators, the strict requirements of leaning, initiative and cooperative learning level, teacher-student interaction level and the richness of educational experience, the score of Tsinghai University is dramatically lower than them. So did the college studuent in Wuhan in CCTST.To improve higher education quality comprehensively, the Ministry of Education and academia have promulgated a batch of documents and implemented many projects,and have set up various indicator systems to assess the higher education quality,however, the result remains that “the quality is generally low.” This paper specifically transfers the question of higher education quality into the research of development of academic acquirement for undergraduates. Focused on solving the main problem, “there are hundreds of definitions about academic acquirement, but what on earth is the essence of it?” “As their grade gets higher, how undergraduates’ academic acquirement levels change?” “There are many elements affecting undergraduates’ academic acquirement development, what is the core element? And how it affects? ”, this research observes the research approach of “why-what-how-and what to do”. First,adopting literature retrieval method(this is the research method used throughout the whole paper), to summarize the existing research on academic acquirement, this paper finds the educational, psychological and physiological basis for the development of undergraduates’ academic acquirement from multi-discipline, such as Pedagogy,Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience; after analyzing the definition and structure model of academic acquirement, it is found that divergences, even misunderstandings about the concept of academic acquirement still exist in the academia for the time being.Different definitions of academic acquirement confound its essence. Adopting lexical analysis to analyze the key words in the existing concepts of academic acquirement,revise the concept and obtain the elements and structure of it. Using questionnaire to research on undergraduates’ academic acquirement level in China and elements affecting its development; this paper also analyzes training programs of 30 universities in China through content analysis, and finds some problems in university curriculum.Finally, it proposes the curriculum strategy in fostering the academic acquirement of undergraduates.According to the understanding of the essence of academic acquirement, there are some similarities between it and the university student engagement theory, which makes use of NSSE. Hence,this research uses NSSE questionnaire as the basis of creating its own questionnaire, dividing undergraduates’ academic acquirement into cognitive and thinking ability, behavior, impetus and efficacy, 4 first-class indicators, 8 second-class indicators and 32 items; dividing influencing factor of undergraduates ’ academic acquirement into curriculum, teachers, students and college support, 4 first-class indicators and 12 second-class indicators or items. Both second-class indicators and items are from NSSE(2013) questionnaire, which guarantees the validity of questionnaire, and its reliability is 0.865. The questionnaire is made by answering factual questions, and is issued among undergraduates in universities in Sichuan and Chongqing through web survey, and 713 valid questionnaires are collected at the end,using education statistics software IBM SPSS 19.0 to conduct data analysis, the paper comes to the following conclusion:1. Through the descriptive analysis and t-test of academic acquirement, it finds that the overall development level of their academic acquirement is lower than 60% of the total, behavior development level is the lowest in academic acquirement.2. Through the linear-regression analysis of the four elements of academic acquirement,it gets the coefficien of the four elements: cognitive and thinking ability >learning motivation > behavior, the ideal learning outcome>the sum of all the aboved elements of academic acquirement.3. The average score of academic acquirement and elements for different grades shows that the academic acquirement development tendency for student from freshmen to seniors goes in a “V” type, it reaches the lowest point in the second year, and it can be called the “sophomore bottom ”phenomenon, resulting from college students and higher education. The problems of college students are mismanagement and laking planning in themselves. Paying scant attention to sophomore, unreasonable university curriculum and college teacher’s teaching requirement also lead to the sophomore bottom phenomenon.4. In statistics, there is significant difference between boy’s academic acquirement and that of girl’s(p <.05), and the latter is obviously higher the former; there is also dramatic differences of academic acquirement for students of different grades(p<.05), sophomores have lower academic acquirement than seniors; academic acquirement of engineering-agriculture students is dramatically higher than that of the literature, history, philosophy and art students(p<.01,p<.01), but there is no obvious differences between literature, history, philosophy students and art students; Undergraduates from “985” and “211” universities have no obvious differences in statistics, however, they have much higher academic acquirement than undergraduates from general universities(p<.01,p<.01).5. In the research of elements affecting development of academic acquirement,curriculum has the highest frequency and mean value, respectively 989 and 1.3871.Thus according to the opinions of undergraduates participating in the research,university curriculum is the main element affecting development of academic acquirement.6. When conducting chi-square tests for curriculum, gender, grade, discipline and university type, we find that curriculum differs a lot from gender, grade and university type(p<.01,p<.05,p<.05),which shows that the influence level of curriculum element on students ‘academic acquirement varies in different gender,grade and university type. Compared with girls, boys are influenced more by curriculum, freshmen and sophomores are less influenced than juniors and seniors;“211” university students are influenced more than students from “985” and general universities.In the study, the content analysis is used to analyze traing goal and curriculum in30 training programs, which of majors in Mechanical Design Manufacturing and Automation, Chinese Language and Literature and Music from 985 univesrsities, 211 universities and general universities. It is found that university curriculum is not a complete system, which lacks of curriculum goal, curriculum implementation and curriculum judgement in training programs. It is also showed that the curriculum from the same university is adopted by different classification basis that leads to the chaotic curriculum classification. What’s more, general courses are paied more attentions in different universities, yet they always make general courses equal to public required courses consisting of ideological and political courses, foreign languages, military sports and computer courses. It results in insufficient play of value judgement, thinking training functions to undergraduates that general courses are supposed to have. Besides,public compulsory courses separate from training target of higher education. Based on established education theory, people analyze and discuss the problem in university curriculum and the relationship between training target and academic acquirement reflected. Finally, curriculum based on target of academic acquirement development is put forward.This study completes the definition of academic acquirement in theory, determines its main elements and structure, gains its linear-regression model, finds the “V” type tendency of different grades in development of academic acquirement and the“sophomore bottom ” phenomenon; confirms the relationship between university curriculum and academic acquirement development; takes some measurement in offering university curriculum to promote the undergraduates’ academic acquirement development. Focusing on the development of undergraduates’ academic acquirement is in favor of improving undergraduates’ learning quality, college teachers’ teaching quality and staff’s management quality in practice, thus achieving the goal of promoting higher education quality will soon come true. In addition, When analyzing the development level of undergraduates’ academic acquirement, if this research can get the average score from the first year to the fourth year, of the same object, it may better demonstrate the development level and tendency of undergraduates’ academic acquirement throughout the four years. The author will continue the more study of university curriculum’s influence on academic acquirement development in the future,which is the model of university curriculum’s influence on academic acquirement development.