How College Affects Students

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

These authors are a couple of the gurus of higher education research, and their book, How College Affects Students, has been cited over the past couple of decades more than any other book of its type. This Chronicle story is about their presentation at the CIC conference that I attended. They are essentially summarizing the research that various graduate students have been doing, harnessing the results of the Wabash Study in particular. Mandy is doing her dissertation using this Wabash Study data and, I believe, in conjunction with one of the presenters. I’m also attaching my notes from the session I attended at the CIC meeting. Much of the information is similar. The CCCU dinner then held a response panel on this topic, in which I was one of the presenters. As you might expect, the 7 respondents had very different things that they focused on. The provost at IWU, for instance, noted that most of our graduates in the CCCU are in adult programs, but that we don’t have very good data on these kinds of topics as they relate to adult learners. Others noted the role of diversity in developing critical thinking skills.

My response focused on the “knowing-doing gap” in that all of our institutions hear these sorts of explanations about academic challenge and student learning outcomes, but we really don’t change much of what we’re doing to accommodate this information. To take just one example, our salary systems are predicated on a 19th century German research model (hierarchical, knowledge based, oriented toward scholarship) instead of rewarding those who produce the best outcomes by these measures of academic challenge and student learning. At the institution-wide level at JBU, for instance, we have almost an inverse relationship between pay levels and academic challenge/student learning outcomes. But it’s obvious that these structures are so firmly ingrained in our academic cultures and that we have such significant questions about the validity or applicability of this type of research (perhaps because these structures are so firmly ingrained?), that I concluded in my talk that we were unlikely in the near future to see any real movement toward taking this data seriously. After my depressing presentation, my fellow panelists felt so bad for me that they gave me a group hug. 


Evidence on student learning - Pascarella & Terenzini

- Wabash Study results of longitudinal studies of 49 institutions and 17,000 students
- conservative approach designed to produce lots and lots of complicated data
- nsse is a reasonable approach at the institutional level to figuring out whether these experiences are leading to the desired outcomes, but much of these outcomes are due to the kinds of students that we recruit and not the programs and activities that we're running
- they replicated academically adrift results with different tests and different students. 17 percentile points over 4 years, roughly 1/3 making non-significant four year gains, spending 15 hours a week studying. But what kind of change and how much should we be looking for? Kids not going through college can also change, some for the better and some for the worse (such as in faith development).
- good teaching does make a difference in engagement and re-enrollment, and they are learnable skills. One standard deviation increase leads to 30% increase in re-enrollment.
- diversity experiences counted more than anything else in developing critical thinking skills. Had the most effect on students with lower ACT scores.
- effect of study abroad is weak, perhaps because of selection effect. Factor that out and it does impact orientation toward engaging in diverse social and cultural activities.
- liberal arts colleges have higher levels of perceived good teaching, high quality of interaction with faculty, academic challenge, high academic expectations, liberal political views
- why does collaborative learning approaches look good here but bad in academically adrift.
- curriculum that is interdisciplinary, integrated, and academically challenging
- out of class experiences have significant effects not just on psychosocial and related social skills but also academic and intellectual skills. Students do have to be involved with this to make it work.
- same with in class experiences affecting social outcomes
- experiences that influence student learning include experiencing different ideas and people, that requires active engagement with this cognitive dissonance, that occurs in a supportive environment, that confronts real world problems, that deals with relationships, that incites reflection and analysis.
- there are many roads to being an effective educational institution, but it does need to follow these approaches and themes
- focusing too much on parts or on best practices is a problem. Focus on the larger themes and on being effectives (outcomes)
- the peer and organizational contexts also affect student learning. It's not only the direct experiences people have but the context within which everyone operates.
- set the culture in the first year

Steve Jobs - Tweaker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell

As usual, I enjoyed Gladwell's explanation of the influence that Jobs has had and why he had it. As with much of Gladwell's work, the argument is that genius is seldom (and less and less so) the lone individual creating ex-nihilo but someone why knows greatness "when he sees it" and then "tweaks" from there to create something much more refined.

Our Universities: Why are they failing?

Good review of some recent books on the topic.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false

Daniel Kahneman, the top social scientist of the last half century?

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Anatomy-of-Influence/129688/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112

Much of what I've been reading in recent years really comes back to Kahneman's work from the 70s.

The West and the Rest?

Niall Ferguson is something of a “bad boy” economic historian from England known for his controversial stances. He’s also become something of a PBS celebrity. Here’s the summary version of his new book and his new PBS series.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/niall-ferguson-how-american-civilization-can-avoid-collapse.html