Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility

Research Represented Within The Research Collaborative

Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose, also supported by the Templeton Foundation. Housed within UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), the Spirituality in Higher Education Study tracks both the spiritual growth of students during the college years and the spiritual experiences and perspectives of college faculty. The study seeks to identify both curricular and co-curricular experiences that facilitate students' spiritual development and employs a multi-institutional and longitudinal design to identify trends, patterns, and principles of spirituality and religiousness among both groups. On the student side, the study utilizes the College Students’ Beliefs and Values (CSBV) Survey, a 2-page, 129-item addendum to the traditional CIRP Freshman Survey. On the faculty side, the study utilizes the HERI Faculty Survey, which includes questions on pedagogical practices as well as faculty beliefs and behaviors related to spirituality.

CSBV scales that relate to the five dimensions of personal and social responsibility include: Spiritual Quest; Charitable Involvement; Compassionate Self-Concept; Ethic of Caring, and Ecumenical Worldview. For more information, see http://spirituality.ucla.edu

The Center for the Study of Ethical Development is an international, loosely-connected network of researchers in moral development. In the past two decades, it has evolved, centering on the Four Component Model of Morality (Rest 1983) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT), the Center's most widely-disseminated measure. Since 1985, 200 to 400 projects each year across the U.S. have used the DIT, culminating in over 2,000 research reports and over 450 research publications and testing about 750,000 participants. As various researchers have collected DIT data and sent them to the Center for computer scoring, these data have been archived. Center faculty and graduate student assistants have integrated findings, performing secondary analyses on these data, summarizing them in published reports, and creating and validating new measures (e.g., “DIT-2”). Most importantly, DIT research findings have been theoretically integrated with recent developments in moral philosophy (attempting to deal with philosophical problems raised about Kohlberg's theory); with schema theory (from Cognitive Science); with other developments in psychology (e.g., identity formation); and with recent cross-temporal meta analyses suggesting generational shifts in feelings of entitlement and self-esteem that appear to be linked to declines in moral judgment development evident in two long-term cross-sectional studies of college and professional school students. Of equal importance are studies demonstrating the effectiveness of context and educational interventions in promoting development.

The DIT-2 relates to the Core Commitments dimension of developing competence in ethical and moral reasoning and action, while the work of the Center on the Four Components of Morality relate directly to the other four Core Commitments dimensions. For more information on the Center and on the DIT-2, see www.centerforthestudyofethicaldevelopment.net

The Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education housed at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, Wabash College. The Wabash Study is a large-scale, longitudinal study designed to: (1) learn what teaching practices, programs, and institutional structures support liberal arts education and (2) develop methods of assessing liberal arts education. The study involves 53 institutions and focuses on seven key outcomes—Effective Reasoning and Problem Solving; Inclination to Inquire and Lifelong Learning; Integration of Learning; Intercultural Effectiveness; Leadership; Moral Reasoning; and Well-Being. The study incorporates both quantitative and qualitative research to examine students as well as institutions. Data includes demographic information, reports of pre-college and collegiate experiences, and direct measurements of outcomes, as well as annual in-depth interviews conducted with students from a subset of institutions over four years.

Wabash Study outcomes that relate to the five dimensions of personal and social responsibility include Intercultural Effectiveness; Leadership; Moral Reasoning; and Well-Being. For more information, see http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/nationalstudy

Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP), developed in partnership with the AAC&U and sponsored by the Committee for Education Funding (CEF), is an on-going project that is exploring the relationships between engaged learning, civic development, and student mental health and well-being. Sponsored by the Charles Engelhard Foundation and developed in partnership with AAC&U, BTtoP supports campus-based initiatives that demonstrate how uses of engaged forms of learning, actively involving students both within and beyond the classroom, directly contribute to their cognitive, emotional, and civic development. To date, the project has engaged more than 300 colleges and universities. BTtoP evaluation employs a multivariate, longitudinal, quasi-experimental approach, at the campus and cross-campus levels. The project utilizes both quantitative and qualitative assessments, including the College Student Experiences Questionnaire, the HERI surveys, the National College Health Assessment, NSSE, an original BTtoP Toolkit instrument, clinical interviews, focus groups, and document analysis.

BTtoP research focuses on students’ well-being and civic development, which relate to the Core Commitments dimensions of Striving for Excellence, Developing Competence in Ethical and Moral Reasoning, Taking Seriously the Perspectives of Others, and Contributing to a Larger Community. For more information, see www.aacu.org/bringing_theory

The Academic Integrity Assessment Guide at the Center for Academic Integrity, Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University, also supported by the Templeton Foundation. The Center for Academic Integrity’s Academic Integrity Assessment Guide is designed to assist colleges, universities, and secondary schools in assessing the climate of academic integrity on their campuses. The Guide helps institution to:(a) evaluate their current academic integrity programs and policies; (b) assess campus attitudes and conduct in the classroom, the lab, and the exam room; (c) identify areas—from sanctions to educational programs—that need strengthening; (d) develop specific plans for improving the adherence to standards of academic honesty; (e) give prominence to dialogue about academic integrity on campus; and (f) increase the awareness of academic integrity issues among faculty, students, and administrators.

The Guide includes surveys for students and faculty, both of which relate to the dimension of Cultivating Personal and Academic Integrity. For more information, see www.academicintegrity.org

Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) at the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, houses the Freshman Survey, Your First College Year survey, the College Senior Survey, and the HERI Faculty Survey. These four surveys are part of the nation's largest and oldest empirical study of higher education, which involves 1,900 institutions, 13,000,000+ students, and 300,000+ faculty. The Freshman Survey (TFS) provides information on incoming, first-year students, and examines readiness for college, how students choose colleges, student values and beliefs about diversity and civic engagement, and student expectations. The Your First College Year (YFCY) survey provides information on the academic and personal development of first-year college students, including persistence, adjustment, academic experiences and achievement, and extracurricular experiences. The College Senior Survey (CSS) gauges the impact of service-learning, leadership development, and student-faculty interactions. When used with TFS or YFCY, it generates longitudinal data on students’ cognitive and affective growth during college. The HERI Faculty Survey provides information about the attitudes, experiences, concerns, job satisfaction, workload, teaching practices, and professional activities of collegiate faculty and administrators.

Individual items on the three student surveys relate to the five dimensions of personal and social responsibility. In the HERI Faculty Survey, questions ask about the relative importance faculty ascribe to developing students’ moral character; providing for students’ emotional development; helping students develop personal values; and enhancing students’ self-understanding. For more information, see www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research gauges student participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development. The survey has items that reflect five major areas: Level of Academic Challenge; Active and Collaborative Learning; Student-Faculty Interaction; Enriching Educational Experiences; and Supportive Campus Environment.

A number of NSSE items relate to the five dimensions of personal and social responsibility. For more information, see http://nsse.iub.edu

For more information, please contact Chad Anderson, Program Associate, at 202-387-3760, ext. 429, or email anderson@aacu.org.