GENERAL EDUCATION COURSES INTEGRATED WITH CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES: EFFECTIVENESS ON THE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

With a conviction that general education should play a significant role in fostering the positive development of university students’ character, several educators integrated various activities that could contribute to such development into general education courses in a technical university in Taiwan. This study surveyed the takers and non-takers of those courses and compared the differences in the scores of eight aspects of character development between the two groups of students. Results revealed that the implemented courses brought up small gains, particularly for male students in the second year, in most of the aspects including “logic and innovation,” “social practices,” “citizenship,” “growth in learning,” and “proactiveness and autonomy.” Female students were found to score significantly higher than male counterparts in all of the aspects and the scores of most aspects exhibited a declining trend with the increasing university years. These results were discussed from the perspectives of the teaching strategies advantageous for character development as well as the mental difference between first-year and third- or fourth-year students. Keywords: general education, character development, quasi-experiment, teaching strategies