Campus Highlight:
Dickinson College
Dickinson College: Four Years as a Demonstration Site
In the August 2009 issue of the BTtoP Newsletter, Ashley Finley (BTtoP national evaluator and former project evaluator and assistant professor of sociology at Dickinson) provided the most compelling “nuggets” of best practice for institutional sustainability and support that were adopted as the result of the intensive four-year project Dickinson College undertook as a Demonstration Site in 2005. In this issue, we attempt to delve deeper into the outcomes in the executive summary of the Dickinson 2010 Final Report. In this report, Finley raises one of the most simple and important questions that guides (and vexes) this type of research: “How can student learning that begins in the first year be connected across the many engaging and meaningful experiences students will have throughout their time at [Dickinson]?”
On a conference call to plan the January 2010 Bringing Theory to Practice Project Faculty Conference, Shalom Staub, assistant provost of Dickinson College, could not mask his level of excitement about the data he and his colleagues had uncovered in their fourth year as a Demonstration Site with BTtoP. It was a remarkable “one-eighty” for both Staub and the BTtoP Project from two years ago, when he had commented at an annual national cross-site meeting that he felt it would be “irresponsible” to attempt to publish outcomes data, as they were not yet significant. Dickinson has now collected four years (2005-2009) of data, comparing cohorts of first-year, sophomore, junior, and senior students for multiple dimensions of student engaged learning, alcohol use, and civic engagement, based on the students’ first-year experiences (learning communities or stand-alone first-year seminars). As the result of meeting a number of challenges that all institutions face, the team found that strategic communication, innovation, and recruitment of leaders, or “change agents,” on campus are central to ensuring intensive transformation of learning and campus cultures.
After four years of creating and conducting surveys and focus groups, finding the best incentives to keep the sample size up, and trying to tease out analyses from data that is often most compelling on the qualitative side, the Dickinson campus team has now been able to report multiple significant quantitative findings, enriched by survey and focus group qualitative data.
The major findings and corresponding analyses or caveats are1:
Students in the first-year, sophomore, and junior samples who participated in learning communities (two first-year seminar courses linked by a common theme; e.g., risk-taking, social inequality, environmental sustainability) seem to be learning in different ways (more likely to reflect on their learning experiences individually and with peers and faculty; learning was also deepened by the integration of community-based interactions and experiences) and engaging at deeper levels than students who were in stand-alone seminars (‘engaging’ refers to engagement in their learning—academic material and the context of cocurricular experiences—at more transformative and proactive levels than students who did not participate in learning communities). Finley pointed out that the report did not imply that students who participated in learning communities learned at a deep level and students in stand-alone seminars learned at a superficial or even strategic level. Rather, these data should be used to suggest how student learning in general may be deepened at formative stages in the college career and what these habits might mean for later development.
After participating in a learning community (versus a stand-alone first-year seminar), students showed higher rates of civic participation and more involvement in civically oriented activities. The robustness of this effect on civic behavior might be explained by the fact that learning communities overall tended to be linked by politically relevant, timely, and civically minded themes, such as social justice, social inequality, identity, sustainability, and the like. The nature of these ties may resonate with students in a way that more clearly connects them personally and emotionally to civic issues and provides opportunities for engagement.
These levels of higher civic participation at the local community level and in civically oriented activities are sustained into the junior year for learning community students relative to students in stand-alone seminars.
First-years, sophomores, and juniors are drinking alcohol less and less often than students who participated in stand-alone first-year seminars (not in learning communities). (See Table 2 for first-year student data.) Rather than the presumptuous suggestion that learning communities “dissuade” students from consuming alcohol or that learning communities somehow are an academic deterrent to drinking, this finding may be an artifact of the social climate created by learning communities, which may supply students with a critical source of social connections early in college that equip them to navigate drinking pressures later on or connect with a group of similar-minded peers. Finley and the BTtoP Project consistently refer to this effect as “acquiring social capital.”
Table 2. Differences on Alcohol Use Measures by All First-Year Cohorts |
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While each of these findings is exciting, one piece that continues to puzzle Dickinson and other institutions in BTtoP is making sense of the mental health outcomes—one of the initial inquiry areas that led to the Project’s launch in 2002. Project participants examined various measures for stress, substance abuse, and depression since the beginning of Dickinson’s project. Findings across all variables (except alcohol, as shown above) were consistently inconclusive.
Across sites, starting in 2007, qualitative trends hinted at a different method by which mental health effects might be observed. The work of Emory University associate professor of sociology Corey Keyes on “flourishing”2 led the national project, including Dickinson, to begin measuring mental health not in terms of “a lack of functioning,” but more through the lens of positive psychology, explaining whether these learning and civic experiences might provide ‘boosts’ in functioning and mental health. Finley describes how the facilitation of peer networks among students in learning communities can exemplify “flourishing”: “Perhaps the strongest component of student flourishing exemplified through students’ learning community experiences was the positive development of social relationships. Students’ connections with peers and faculty were clearly a defining, satisfying, and meaningful element of this experience.” Finley’s report notes that the building of “social capital” among peers, combined with mentoring and meaningful interaction with faculty, were important aspects of “flourishing” among learning community students.
Finley also described students’ reflection on how “continuing conversations beyond the formalities of the classroom [into their learning community where they lived] and beyond the purview of the professor helped to facilitate learning and their own self-reflection.” In an era when students are much more apt to get on their iPods and cell phones after class, rather than gathering to talk in person and debrief, just how important is meaningful engagement both in and out of the classroom? And how can we best facilitate it on all of our campuses?
From the perspective of Dickinson College, “This project demonstrates that early learning experiences are powerful in their own right but need clear complements that ensure a sophomore, junior and senior experience through which students can channel and be engaged beyond their first-year experience. Not every course can contain a service-learning component or even a living component. This work suggests that these aren’t necessary. The reflection students gain from interactions facilitated in learning communities and the meaningful connection to their lives that can become common currency across courses, majors, and the general education curriculum can sustain and maximize these experiences for students.”3
Notes
1 Ashley Finley, “The First-Year Experience and Learning Communities at Dickinson: Findings from Four Years of Research” (working paper, December 2009). To request information about the report, please contact Ashley Finley (finley@aacu.org).
Corey Keyes, “Mental Health in Adolescence: Is America’s Youth Flourishing?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 76 no. 3 (2006): 305-402
Ashley Finley, “The First-Year Experience and Learning Communities at Dickinson: Findings from Four Years of Research” (working paper, December 2009).
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