Reflections on “Fundamentals of Natural Science” : Results of Course Surveys and Interviews for Review
MICHIWAKI, Ayako & KUDO, Kanako

The JLC One Year Program offers “Fundamentals of Natural Science (hereafter F.N.S)” for science majors. In the past five years, we have come to recognize that our students will be majoring in a variety of subjects and the content and vocabulary presented in the F.N.S textbook simply has not been keeping up with the times. Accordingly, it is essential for us to seriously reconsider the content of the F.N.S. course at this time. For that reason, we distributed surveys and interviewed the students in our program about their experience in the F.N.S. course. Our queries were from the perspective of 1) the necessity of the course and its significance, 2) the purpose of the course, 3) the class length and the number of class periods, 4) the study topics and rate of progress, 5) the materials used and 6) the evaluation methods used.
The results indicated that for students in the scientific fields, especially, the F.N.S. course acts as an important conduit to enable them to go on and study chemistry and physics. The survey and interview process also seemed to indicate that the purpose of the course, the class length and the number of class periods all seem appropriate as they are. However, the results also showed that there is a good deal of room for improvement in the realms of the study topics, rate of progress, materials used and evaluation methods. Therefore, the goal for the future is to use the information gathered to improve the class content and the materials and to continue to elicit this sort of feedback from the students.