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The Chronicle of Higher Education...
What Spurs Students
to Stay in College and Learn?
Good Teaching Practices and Diversity
By Dan Berrett
November 6, 2011
Good teaching and exposure to students from diverse backgrounds are
some of the strongest predictors of whether freshmen return for a
second year of college and improve their critical-thinking skills, say
two prominent researchers.
Patrick T. Terenzini, a professor of higher education at Pennsylvania
State University, and Ernest T. Pascarella, a co-director of the Center
for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa,
spoke to an audience of chief academic and fund-raising officers
convened by the Council of Independent Colleges here on Sunday.
The two men are co-authors of a highly influential book, How College
Affects Students, and they sought on Sunday to synthesize what recent
research says about student learning, while also weighing in on recent
controversies in higher-education research.
Mr. Pascarella based his observations on the findings from the first
year of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, which
followed thousands of students at 19 liberal-arts colleges. It recorded
the background information of entering freshmen, asked them about their
experiences, recorded their outcomes after their first year, and
collected the same information again after their fourth year.
Good teaching was not defined by test results. Instead, its attributes
were identified on a nine-item scale, which included student appraisals
of how well the teacher organized material, used class time, explained
directions, and reviewed the subject matter.
The likelihood that freshmen returned to college for their sophomore
year increased 30 percent when students observed those teaching
practices in the classroom. And it held true even after controlling for
their backgrounds and grades. “These are learnable skills that faculty
can pick up,” Mr. Pascarella said.
Exposure to students of diverse backgrounds was measured on a
nine-point “interactional diversity scale,” which asked students
whether they had made friends with a person of a different race,
attended a diversity workshop, or interacted with others with different
religious or political views, among other measures. The gains in
critical-thinking skills over four years were strongest for students
who entered college with weaker academic backgrounds, defined as those
with scores of 27 or lower on the ACT college-entrance examination.
The Wabash National Study, Mr. Pascarella said, is one of the most
complex and rich data sources he had ever worked with. “We wanted a
home movie,” he told the crowded session. “What we have is a Hollywood
spectacular.”
The data also allowed Mr. Pascarella to cast a fresh eye on two highly
used, often cited, and sometimes controversial pieces of research. The
first was the National Survey of Student Engagement, or “Nessie” for
short.
“Nessie’s gotten a lot of heat lately,” Mr. Pascarella said. He
analyzed Nessie results for the colleges in the Wabash study, checking
to see if the categories captured in the survey reflected gains in
critical-thinking skills. He found “decent relationships” between the
measures that Nessie deems important, like positive student attitudes
toward literacy, and gains in critical-thinking skills in the first
year, which were observed through other tests.
“I can’t reject the possibility of a causal relationship between these
experiences and these outcomes,” Mr. Pascarella said.
But he also cautioned his audience of leaders of small liberal-arts
colleges against making too much of Nessie’s positive results. For
those types of institutions, about half of the effects on students
observed in Nessie could be attributed to the kinds of people who
attend those colleges.
“Mostly, it’s due to the students you recruit,” he said. “They have
nothing to do with the programs.”
He also sought to replicate the findings of Academically Adrift, the
blockbuster book released this year that argues that 36 percent of
college students show no significant gains in learning between freshman
and senior year. The book’s authors, Richard Arum, of New York
University, and Josipa Roksa, of the University of Virginia, also found
that just under half of students wrote papers of 20 pages or more each
semester and that they spent 13 to 14 hours per week studying.
Mr. Terenzini ran a similar analysis, but used the Collegiate
Assessment of Academic Proficiency instead of the Collegiate Learning
Assessment, as Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa did. Still, he achieved similar
results. Among students in the small colleges he studied, 33 percent
failed to show significant gains in learning, 60 percent wrote papers
of at least 20 pages, and they spent 15 hours studying each week.
Mr. Pascarella cautioned against reading too much into measures of
change. No one has tracked the gains in critical thinking among young
people who don’t attend college, which means there is no control group
to compare college students to. The other problem, he said, is that no
consensus exists about precisely how much people should change while in
college.
“Until we know that, it’s like a fistfight in a dark room,” he said.
Still, the findings are alarming enough, said Mr. Pascarella, and his
findings only buttress those from Academically Adrift. “These folks
need to be taken seriously,” he said. “They met the test of
replicability.”
Read this and other articles at the Chronicle of Higher Education
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