Eastern Oregon University has about 3,700 students, half of whom take at least one course using distance-learning technology.

Engaging Students with High-Impact Practices at Eastern Oregon University

Eastern Oregon University has faced challenges in the past several years that were disheartening even for an institution founded on a sense of can-do frontier optimism. The university, an institution of about 3,700 students located in La Grande, Oregon, serves a remote rural area the size of Pennsylvania in the eastern half of the state. Because of the region’s geography, more than half of EOU students participate in distance learning for at least a portion of their coursework. Facing budget cuts, a leadership crisis, and declining enrollments, the state legislature even considered shutting down the university a few years ago. But since late 2007, EOU has managed not only to avoid catastrophe, but also to flourish. The university is especially dedicated to ensuring that its first-year students—more than 60 percent of whom are the first in their families to attend college—are exposed to a set of high-impact practices that encourage retention, academic achievement, and a sense of belonging.

Building a First-Year Experience

High-impact practices (HIPs) are a set of teaching and learning practices that have been widely tested and shown to be beneficial for college students from many backgrounds (Kuh 2008, Brownell and Swaner 2010). The high-impact practices on which AAC&U has published research include first-year seminars, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments, undergraduate research, writing-intensive courses, service learning, diversity/global learning, internships, and capstone courses or projects. At EOU, a number of these practices—particularly capstone courses and practicums—had long been embedded in the third and fourth years, explains Sarah Witte, associate vice provost for academic affairs. “But we realized that we had done very little for students coming through the door, in terms of engaging them immediately,” she says. “Given our demographics, having some high-impact practices at the beginning of the curricular structure was very important.”

So in 2008, with support and a grant from AAC&U as part of its LEAP Give Students a Compass Project, Witte and her colleagues in the student affairs division began the university’s inaugural first-year experience program. Give Students a Compass supports general education reform and academic excellence for all students, emphasizing the success of those traditionally underrepresented in higher education. “We wanted our first-year program to be a three-legged stool,” Witte says. “It needs to provide academic support features, social opportunities for students to get to know each other and make EOU their home away from home, and also connect students to resources on campus that they might not know about.”  

The program EOU developed features a set of two quarter-long linked seminars in which all entering students with fewer than thirty credit hours are automatically enrolled. Students who test into remedial writing take a set called Core 101 and 102; other students take Humanities 101 and 102. Both sets of seminars are taught as partnerships between academic affairs and student affairs, with facilitators from the student affairs and enrollment services divisions and faculty partners from various academic departments. While each facilitator­-faculty partnership is a bit different, Witte says, they all have the same goal: to provide students with supportive, approachable adults who can help them learn to succeed academically.

Christy Oliveri, coordinator for the First-Year Experience program, developed the standard curriculum each seminar follows. In the first few quarters of the FYE, the seminars focused on skill development like note-taking and how to study effectively, as well as introductions to campus resources like the Learning Center and student health center.  But students weren’t particularly engaged with the material. “We changed the curriculum to teach these same skills through engaging experiences,” Oliveri explains. One significant assignment students in FYE now undertake is called the “This I Believe” project, based on the eponymous NPR segment. Students develop credos, write personal essays, give oral presentations of their essays, and discuss issues like tolerance and respect for others’ beliefs. “There’s still the information about study skills, time management, the culture of higher education, and campus resources in this curriculum, but facilitators and faculty can use it more creatively,” Oliveri says. “Students say things like ‘Now I understand why I believe what I believe, and I also understand why other people believe different things.’ These are great learning outcomes.”

	Students in a first-year seminar about conducting original research studied EOU seniors and determined that professor-student interactions were very important to their success.

First-year students intending to transfer out of EOU and into programs like nursing or dental hygiene are grouped into cohort FYE sections that emphasize preparation for applying to EOU’s partner healthcare programs at Oregon Health Science University and Oregon College of Dental Sciences, explains Kimberly Mueller, a FYE facilitator and preprofessional health adviser. “This is a special population in terms of their priorities, but the learning outcomes they need are the same. They do extra assignments directly connected to their program, and we also have them come up with a ‘Plan B’ for their education in case they’re not accepted.”

Oliveri also instituted a “peer leader” component for the first-year seminar, in which a student who has completed the program is matched with a first-year seminar section and provides advice and support. The peer leaders receive course credit for the required training, but their participation is voluntary. “The peer leaders are really beneficial,” Mueller says. “They can explain to the students why certain assignments are relevant, and they provide a great deal of insight into the ‘Why do I have to take this course?’ question.” Peer leaders also benefit from the close relationships they develop with the facilitators and faculty members teaching their seminars.

Embedding Undergraduate Research

In fall 2010, associate professor of English and writing Nancy Knowles piloted a section of Hum 101 that embedded another high-impact practice: undergraduate research. Working with Colleen Dunne-Cascio, EOU director of student relations, Knowles developed a course she hoped would accomplish the first-year seminar’s learning outcomes in a novel way: by asking students to conduct original research. “I really wanted to convey to the students that this is what a university does—creates new knowledge,” Knowles says. “I think we tend to wait too long to involve students in that.”

Dunne-Cascio recognized that gathering data from students about their academic experiences could provide information to student affairs about strengths and weaknesses throughout the university. She and Knowles created a seminar in which first-year students collect this data. “We let our students develop the research questions and the target population,” Knowles explains. “They designed questions that they really wanted to have answered.”

Students still worked on the same learning outcomes as their peers in other Hum 101 sections, Dunne-Cascio says, but in different ways. “For time management, they had to determine how to bring the parts of the project together and make time for it. For critical thinking, we gave them NSSE data and our own institutional demographic data, and asked them to develop questions.”  Students learned to read research reports and understand the sections, including introduction, methods, and analysis.  They also talked about good research practices, Knowles says. “We ran everything in the project through the institutional review board, and that was a great opportunity to talk to the students about ethics. This was just a snapshot of research, but it was authentic.”

The students ultimately decided to target EOU seniors, and each student contributed qualitative data to the class study by conducting and transcribing an interview with a senior student.  Each student also wrote a paper analyzing his or her interview, and each made a public presentation of the results at the end of the quarter.

Some of the students’ research results were enlightening, Knowles says. “One thing we were really surprised to find was how very important professor-student interaction was to the seniors. They said that their coursework got harder as they moved up, but that their interactions and the bonds they formed with professors also grew, and it made work at the upper division easier.”  In addition, she says, all the interviewees were low-income students, all had jobs, and many had families. “One interviewee was working three part-time jobs and had issues getting to class,” Knowles says. “This really emphasized our need to make education accessible. We’re serving a new type of student, and if we want to get 60 percent of Americans through college, these are signposts of what we need to change.”

Assessing High-Impact Practices

In measuring the effect of the first-year experience program, EOU administrators look at several factors, Witte says. One of the most straightforward is retention from the first year to the second. At the end of the first year in which the new FYE curriculum was used, EOU saw an 18 percent increase in first-year student retention. While Witte and Oliveri both caution that the improvement is only a correlation, and not indicative of a causal relationship, they are still pleased. “We’re in the high 60 percents for retention now, with a net gain of 14 percent for the second FYE cohort,” Witte says. “I call what we do in the FYE ‘vigilant nurturing.’ We want to know students’ names, keep track of them, stay in touch, and talk about their struggles.”

Oliveri assesses students’ learning gains during the FYE using quantitative scales and open-ended questionnaires, data from which will be used to adjust the seminars’ content. And at the university level, EOU has been working since 2008 to develop University Learning Outcomes, map learning goals within each academic department, set up assessment cycles, and develop rubrics and performance benchmarks.

One thing faculty and administrators at EOU have already found, however, is that students appreciate learning activities that are engaging and relevant. “We talked a lot about the why and the how of research at the beginning of our seminar, and the students were really impatient to get started,” Knowles says. “They were saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s get to the meat of it. Let’s get to the data.’ That’s a testament to the impact of the activity.”

For more information on the Give Students a Compass project, visit its Web page. Purchase copies of AAC&U’s publications on high-impact practices: High-Impact Educational Practices and Five High-Impact Practices. For more information about EOU, visit its website.

References

Brownell , Jayne E. and Lynn E. Swaner. 2010. Five High-Impact Practices: Research on Learning Outcomes, Completion, and Quality. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, George D. 2008. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.