“Current events are very important to macroeconomics because we’re talking about business cycles and long-term economic growth,” she explained.
Many professors share Bogan’s belief that updating courses is important, according to a recent study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities that examined how frequently professors make changes to course curricula. The study’s findings indicate that 86.6 percent of professors, surveyed at 20 four-year colleges or universities, make minor or major changes to their courses at least once per year.
While many Princeton professors said that the University does not actively promote curricular changes, they said it is still important to update their courses.
“Every term that I teach, I make changes because I learn from the students,” said Yael Niv, a neuroscience professor who is currently teaching NEU 338: Animal Learning and Decision Making. “I get feedback from them — what works, what doesn’t — so I change the order of things, what I include and what I don’t. Every year I take some things out and put some things in.”
This is Niv’s second year teaching the course at Princeton, after teaching it for two years at Israel’s Hebrew University. She changed her teaching style when she came to Princeton, she said, making the course much more interactive.
The association’s study indicated that 37 percent of professors said they had adopted a new pedagogy in at least one of their classes in the past year.
While the changes in course content have not been drastic, Niv said she did remove one lecture and add another this semester — a big change in a 12-lecture course, she noted — in response to student feedback. She added that she always makes sure to keep up with relevant advances in the rapidly changing field of neuroscience.
Carles Boix, a co-professor of WWS 300: Democracy, a course required for all Wilson School concentrators and certificate students, said in an e-mail that he has altered the four-year-old course multiple times based on student feedback.
He said there was a major change in the curriculum after the course’s first year, noting that students found the mix of normative and empirical topics to be disorganized. The course is now divided into two sections, one focusing on democratic theory and one exploring the spread of democracy.
Across the board, professors said that they regularly change their courses without institutional prodding and they appreciate the University giving them independence to change curricula as they see fit.
“It’s not so much that the University or the department chairman says, ‘Hey, you’d better find something new,’ ” said chemis-try department chair Martin Semmelhack, who teaches CHM 303: Organic Chemistry I: Biological Emphasis. “The faculty are very motivated to do that. They’re always thinking, ‘How can I do this better?’ ”
Semmelhack noted, though, that he is restrained from making more drastic changes that would modernize the course because many pre-medical students need to learn certain material in order to prepare for the Medical College Admission Test.
Niv also said that the University gave her a great deal of freedom to innovate; she alters her curriculum not only for her students, but for herself.
“It’s more fun to teach a course that’s more in line with the current ideas and your current interests,” Niv said. “I enjoy teaching, and if you let your course stagnate, you’re not going to enjoy it anymore.”
Deputy Dean of the College Peter Quimby, who also serves on the Committee on the Course of Study, which oversees curricular changes, said that the University rarely, if ever, interferes in changing the content of a course that has already been approved.
“Most changes don’t require central review,” he said. “Courses evolve naturally over time, and we don’t want to get in the way of that.”
The University offers resources to professors if they decide to broadly change their curricula. In 1996 the University set up the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education. It gives professors a $10,000 summer stipend to create new courses and revamp existing ones, Quimby said. Three categories — New or Redesigned Introductory Courses, New or Redesigned Foundational Courses, and Rethinking of Departmental Curricula — allow departments to apply for funding to alter existing courses.
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