A Study of the Determinants of General Education at Four-Year Universities

This study aims to explore the determinants of the students’ outcomes of general education. For this purpose, this study measured the outcomes of general education using four sub-areas with the “The Evaluation Tool for Students’ Outcomes in General Education” and investigated the priorities and interactions among the factors by entering independent variables related to general education, such as taking the general education curriculum, the satisfaction with general education, self-regulated learning, and the happiness in decision tree analysis. The analysis data were collected by random sampling from students at four-year universities nationwide and through an online survey, and data from a total of 671 students’ responses were analyzed. The main results of the decision tree analysis are as follows. First, the most important determinant of the outcomes of overall general education, humanistic value establishment, and creative problem-solving ability performance is ‘learning management’ or ‘self-regulated learning’. Second, the most important determinant of the outcomes of the pursuit of scientific value is whether the students took ‘Natural Sciences’ classes. Third, the most important determinant of the outcomes of knowledge was convergence ability. Fourth, there were differences between the determinants of the outcomes of general education (overall) and those of the four sub-areas. Effective measures for improving the outcomes of general education were proposed according to the research results.