New Stanford courses stress critical thinking
The more than 1,768 freshmen starting classes today (Sept. 24) at Stanford University will be the first class to undertake a new set of undergraduate requirements and courses, according to school officials.
The freshmen will be required to take “Thinking Matters” courses, multi-disciplinary courses organized around a single question, school officials said.
A total of 35 such courses are being introduced this fall with focuses including “Education as Self-Fashioning,” “The Science of MythBusters,” “Breaking Codes, Finding Patterns” and “Constituting Justice.”
The classes, part of Stanford’s new approach to undergraduate education, are intended to stress critical thinking rather than accumulation of knowledge through course content, school officials said.
Stanford is rolling out a number of new general education requirements over the next few years, based on the recommendations of a two-year study completed earlier this year.
The university also plans to add new breadth requirements for courses taken outside the major, effective for freshmen starting in 2013.
— Bay City News Service
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