Bringing Total Quality Improvement into the college classroom

Abstract

This paper describes a recent effort to infuse the Total Quality Improvement (TQI) approach, popularized by Deming and others, into an upper-division, junior-senior economics course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The process of infusing TQI into instruction has received relatively little attention. Most efforts to bring TQI into higher education focus on improving administrative operations and establishing courses and programs for students to learn how to apply TQI in their future jobs. The challenge is in using TQI to help students realize their potential for learning in traditional courses. The TQI instruction approach developed for use in the course had three major elements. Customer Focus is represented by the proficiencies emphasized in the course and expected of graduating economics majors. Student Involvement is represented by team-centered research projects whose purpose is to enhance the proficiency of creating new knowledge. Continuous Improvement is represented by ongoing student evaluations of the course and instructor, carried out by a student team. After discussing the motivation for adopting this approach and the independent development of the concept of proficiencies in the economics major, the paper moves on to discuss the planning, implementation, and execution of the course. Particular attention is given to discussing the operation of the teams and the development of a multi-faceted ongoing evaluation process to assess the effectiveness of the TQI Instructional Approach. The evaluation results indicate strong student satisfaction with the TQI orientation of the course, while at the same time pointing out ways of improving what was done.