Welcome back!  I hope your engine is recharged for the spring term.

You might remember that about this time last year I was talking to anyone who would listen about the importance of the final round of data collection for the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS).  The WNS was designed to combine learning outcome measures with student experience and pre-college characteristics data so that institutions could (1) assess student change over time on specific learning outcomes and (2) begin to identify the experiences that influenced that progress.  Augustana joined the third and final iteration of the WNS in 2008, so 2012/13  was our make or break year to get data from as many seniors as possible.  Since the study measured change over time, without senior year data, participation in the study would have been a giant waste of time.  After a nearly herculean effort and a paper bag full of gift cards to the Augie bookstore, we were able to entice about 190 seniors to participate – 120 of whom had also provided data during their freshman year.  All together, this dataset gives us a chance to thoroughly analyze the learning experience of a fairly representative sample of our 2012 graduates and make some generalizations about our overall educational effectiveness.

Last week we received the first of several long-awaited reports outlining our students’ results on the learning outcomes measured by the WNS.  I’d like to share one particular finding (I’ll share others with you over the course of the spring term) and ask your help in thinking about what might be behind it.  It’s not quite “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (thank you, Winston Churchill), but it’s got me flummoxed.

One outcome of particular importance to religiously-affiliated liberal arts colleges is moral and ethical judgment.  For a lot of reasons we hope that our students develop a  sophisticated sense of the principles and values that shape their understanding of right and wrong.  Moreover, we hope that our graduates act as principled citizens who stand up for those values even in the face of pressure to conform or fear of reprisal.

It turns out that Augustana students made remarkable gains on the WNS measure of moral judgment.  In fact, our students’ gains were on average 50% larger than the average gains made by students at the 32 other small colleges that participated in the WNS.  Digging a little deeper, virtually all of that positive advantage (i.e., the 50% larger gain noted above) occurred during the first year.  After making substantially larger gains than students at comparable institutions, during the sophomore to senior year our students’ growth did not differ substantially from students at other institutions in the study.  In other words, our student raced out to big lead during the first year and held it through to graduation.

This finding is both exciting and, to be honest, a little troubling.  First, it is exciting that we now have some hard evidence to support our claim that Augustana graduates develop deeper and more sophisticated moral and ethical judgment.  One of the major criticisms of higher education institutions is that we make bold claims with very little proof to back them up.  Now we can say with some degree of certainty that we do what we say we do.

However, there is something about this finding that troubles me – and is the issue that I’d like your help with.  The findings from the WNS suggest that the bulk of our students’ growth in moral judgment happens during their first year.  Since we would like to think that we have intentionally designed the educational experience of our students, then we should be able to point to the program or combination of programs that likely produce this remarkable gain in moral judgment.  This is from whence my flummox cometh.

Now if we were only interested in proving our educational value, this data would make me think something along the lines of “game, set, match Vikings.”  But our interest in assessing student learning shouldn’t be merely about validating claims that we’ve already made. That is a dangerous game to play to be sure.  Rather, I want to know how we can do what we do just a little bit better.  Instead of merely proving our worth, I’m interested in improving our quality.

And I don’t think I can pinpoint any particular program that is designed to influence this outcome.  Our only curricular mandate for first year students is the LSFY sequence.  Are their other courses that we might to which we might attribute these gains, such as the Christian Traditions course?  I know the faculty who teach those courses do wonderful things, but I’m not sure the focus of that course is developing moral judgment.  Is there a program designed for first year students that is run by residence life or student activities?  I just don’t know.

The reason it seems important to me to be able to identify the experiences that are driving this gain is that we should want to take full advantage of this finding and figure out ways that we can take advantage of something that we are already doing well.  And this is where I’m stuck.  What are we doing that is working?  Is this just luck?  Coincidence?  I’d like to think not.

It seems pretty likely that there is something going on here that sets us apart from the other schools in the WNS.  The number of participants in the study and the size of the difference in gains is just too large for this to be a function of random chance.  So if you have an idea of what might be influencing our students’ gains in moral judgment, please post it in the comments section.  For us to be best able to (1) make our case as an institution to prospective students and families, and (2) maximize what we do in a way that takes full advantage of our talents and resources, we need to figure out what is driving these gains.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Most of us have heard about – or tried to defuse – at least one student who blew a gasket over their inability to get into a course that they thought they had to take during the next term.  Since we’ve just finished the registration period for spring, I’ve been thinking a bit more about our analysis of one item on the 2012 senior survey that relates to students’ course taking experience.  Seniors were asked to respond to the following statement.

“The courses I needed to take were available in the order in which I needed to take them.”

There were five response options ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” (we scored them from 1 to 5 for the purposes of statistical analysis).  Our 2012 seniors’ average response score was 3.42.  Their responses were distributed like this:

Of course, we’d probably like the vast majority of our students to indicate “agree” or “strongly agree.”  However, just over 40% of our seniors selected “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” or “neutral.”  This begs two questions:

1. To what degree is our students’ response to this item important?
2. What could we do to influence our students’ responses in the future?

Most of the time, the story of the aforementioned panicking student concludes with a successful resolution – at least in terms of whether or not they were able to take the courses required to graduate in four years.  Often, a student’s panic can be assuaged when they realize that there are multiple course-taking patterns that will get them to the same outcome.  So, how important should it be to us whether students think that they were able to get into the classes they wanted to take when they thought they needed to take them?

It turns out that it may actually be pretty important.  We conducted a series of analyses of our senior survey data to identify the experiences that might be most directly influential on two outcomes, 1) the degree to which a senior would choose Augustana again if they could relive their college decision (a proxy for the value that a student thinks they got out of their education), and 2) the degree to which a senior is certain that their post-graduate plan is a good fit for who they are and where they want their life to go (a proxy for the student’s sense of the quality and clarity of their preparation for life after college).  Even after accounting for differences in students’ race, sex, pre-college ACT score, socio-economic status, and a variety of other curricular experiences, the degree to which courses were available in the order the student needed to take them proved to be a positive, statistically significant predictor of both outcomes.  In other words, students who felt courses were available in the order they needed to take them were also more likely to say that they would definitely choose Augustana again and were more certain that their post-graduate plans were a good fit for who they are and where they want their life to go.

It seems to me as if two things are going on here.  First, students often perceive themselves to be customers (sometimes to our great aggravation) and expect that the education for which they’ve enrolled – and are paying a lot of money – should be available in the manner that they choose it.  So if a student didn’t get into the classes they initially wanted to take, or were not able to take all of the major courses that interested them, they may well think that they didn’t get the full value of their investment.  While we’d like to provide an environment in which every student was able to take the courses they want when they want them, we all know that this is simply impossible.  This reality further emphasizes the value of an advising conversation that helps students understand their college education as replete with options and opportunity rather than constrained to a single checklist.

Second, although our students’ sense of Augustana’s educational worth is important, I am particularly intrigued by the statistically significant positive relationship between our students’ sense of sequence in their course-taking experience and their certainty that their post-graduate plans are a good fit for them.  The history of curricular design in higher education reveals a substantial shift from an entirely prescriptive curriculum with few – if any – choices a century ago to a sort of modern day modular smorgasbord where students select from a range of choices across a series of categories.  As institutions have focused more specifically on student learning we are repeatedly finding that this cafeteria approach, while it might give faculty more freedom to teach what they want to teach, ends up numbing students to the possibility of a holistic learning experience.  In some cases, especially at larger institutions, it also produces an almost laughable lack of awareness of what is going on outside of a given faculty member’s courses or department.  For our students, I suspect that a more sequential course-taking experience allows them to see the developmental nature of their education and to integrate each of the pieces into an accumulative whole.  In addition, it allows faculty to talk about the curriculum as a developmental construction in conversations with students.

The correlation between students’ sequential course-taking experience and their certainty of post-graduate plan fit suggests to me that the value of a more intentional curriculum can be framed around its benefits for student learning – not just about better “customer service” (a phrase that makes my skin crawl when used to refer to educational concepts).  Establishing a curriculum that embodies the developmental nature of learning encourages students to think about their own growth and, through that process, become more confident in their own progress toward their future goals.

So if you are in the midst of a conversation about curricular revision, I hope you’ll be able to shape your efforts around an explicitly intentional design.  And when you are talking with students about their course-taking choices, I hope you’ll suggest to them a strategic way of thinking about course selection.

Make it a good day,

Mark

One clear trend among college students during the past several decades is the increasing proportion of students who maintain a job while attending school.  At Augustana, more than half of our students work on campus, while many more hold jobs off campus.  Typically, this phenomenon has been cast as a detriment to the college student experience since – as the argument goes – the obligations of work take away from the time that students might spend involved in co-curricular activities or studying for their courses.  I have sometimes heard folks talk about the ideal student employment as a position where the student can do their homework while sitting at a desk.  However, I’d like to suggest that work – especially if it is conceived as an educational experience – can be powerfully beneficial to our students’ development.

A few weeks ago I met with our Student Affairs senior staff to talk about ways that we can use our student data to support their work.  Soon our conversation turned to the possible educational impact of the Community Adviser (CA) position on the students who hold these jobs.  It’s time-intensive work that can sometimes be especially challenging when sorting through the whims and wiles of first year students.  And even though this position might seem to be a hybrid of co-curricular involvement and student employment, the requirements of the position obligate CAs to forego other opportunities on and off-campus.  So we thought it would be useful to test whether or not students who hold CA positions gain some unique educational benefit from the experience.

We chose to compare responses of CAs and non-CAs on one question from the senior survey that asks students to respond to the statement, “My co-curricular involvement helped me develop a better understanding of my leadership skills.”   The response options ranged from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5).  The CA’s average response score was a 4.63, while the non-CA’s average response was a 4.26.  Statistically, this difference proved to be significant despite the small number of CAs (20) out of the total number of responses (511).  This suggests that there might indeed be something about a CA position that provides a unique educational benefit for those students.

While this specific finding might not qualify as the most rigorous quantitative analysis, it replicates other research on the educational benefits of student employment.  After examining the impact of work across the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study, my colleagues and I found that students who worked made gains on several aspects of leadership skills that non-working students did not (you can read the full study here).  Furthermore, the more hours per week that students worked, the larger the educational gain.  This held true even after we accounted for students’ other co-curricular involvement.

Now I’m not suggesting that co-curricular involvement is somehow frivolous.  There are lots of powerful educational benefits that can come from involvement in a variety of activities.  But these findings suggest that maybe work shouldn’t be considered a detriment to the student experience.  In fact, I would suggest that each of us who oversee student workers have an opportunity to uniquely influence their development in important ways.  We only miss that opportunity if we don’t conceive of the employment opportunity as a learning experience.  In the same way that we would like to develop our students as autonomous learners, we should hope to develop our student employees as autonomous workers.  That means giving them more than a simple checklist of things to do and instead, asking them to help solve problems and contribute to the quality of the working environment.

So I hope that you will take the time to think about your student workers as students, and see your role in overseeing their work as an educational one.

Make it a good day,

Mark

While we consider a variety of measures to assess our educational effectiveness, we focus on our retention rate (the proportion of full-time first year students who return for a second year) for some pretty crucial reasons.  First, it’s a legitimate proxy for the quality of our educational and socially-inclusive environment.  Second, as a tuition-dependent institution every student we lose represents lost revenue; and there is real truth to the old adage that it costs more to recruit students than it does to retain them.  So every year we calculate our retention rate, hold it up next to the last five or ten years-worth of numbers and ask ourselves:

Did we do a good job of retaining students?

Most of the time, we end up telling ourselves that our retention rate falls somewhere between “decent” and “pretty good” – especially considering all of the things we can’t control.  But this conversation always leads us to the next question; one that is substantially more difficult to answer:

What should our retention rate be?

And that is where people in charge start to daydream and folks in the trenches start to cringe.  Because it’s all too common for a small group of folks – or even one folk – to arbitrarily decide on the institution’s goal for 1st-to-2nd year retention without any sense of whether or not that number is a reasonable goal.  And there’s nothing more corrosive to an educational organization’s long-term quality than assigning an unrealistic goal to the people you depend on to accomplish it.  So over the last few months, I’ve been wondering how we could get closer to figuring out what Augustana’s ideal retention rate should be.  I don’t know if I have an answer yet – or if there really is a right answer – but I’d like to share some numbers and consider their implications.

Since research on retention suggests that a primary predictor of student success is a student’s incoming academic ability or preparation, it seems reasonable to use our students’ ACT score as a starting point to test whether or not we could realistically expect to improve our retention rate.  If most of the students that we lose are also those who enter with low ACT scores, it suggests that the students we lose depart because they are academically unprepared and it’s therefore more likely that we’re already pretty close to our optimum retention rate.  However, if most of the students we lose enter with ACT scores comparable to our average freshman ACT score, then it’s likely that we still have room to improve.  And if this latter possibility proves to be so, we could consider a few additional factors and come closer to identifying a “ceiling” retention rate from which we could begin to choose a plausible goal.

To begin this process, we took the two most recent cohorts for which we can calculated retention rates (2010 and 2011) and broke down the students who departed before the beginning of their second year by incoming ACT scores.  The table below shows the number of students in each of three different categories – the bottom quartile (<22), the middle 50% (22-28), and the top quartile (>28) – that departed before the second year.

Clearly, in both of these cohorts the majority of the students who left entered with ACT scores in the middle 50% rather than the bottom quarter.  Thus, to the degree that ACT score is a proxy for pre-college academic preparation, it appears that there might be some room for us to realistically improve our 1st-to-2nd year retention rate.

However, ACT score doesn’t necessarily reflect the degree to which a student has the personality traits and personal habits (persistence, time management, motivation, etc.) to succeed in college.  And there are plenty of students who enter with low ACT scores and thrive at Augustana.  So another way to explore this data is to consider the number of students who left in good academic standing.  Even though good academic standing at Augustana is a 2.0, in an effort to be conservative in this analysis, I set the bar at a GPA of 2.5.

From the 2010 cohort, 48 of the students who left departed with a GPA above a 2.5.  From the 2011 cohort, 58 students fit into this category.  Again, both of these numbers suggest some degree of opportunity for improvement.  I emphasize caution here because there are many reasons why students depart that are beyond our control (health issues, financial exigency, or family emergencies).  In addition, some students leave for non-academic reasons that aren’t accounted for in this rudimentary analysis.  So we would be wise to estimate a number substantially below the 48 or 58 students noted above.

Where does that leave us?  Well, I would suggest that a reasonable starting point would be to build out from the 2010 cohort.  As it stands, our retention rate with that group was 87.6% – the highest on record.  If we assume that, with some combination of improved programming , advising, and student support, half of those 48 students could have been retained, that means that we could estimate an additional 24 students – or an increase of about 3 percentage points in our retention rate.  That would put us at an optimum retention rate – a best possible scenario – of between 90% and 91%.

How does that compare to colleges like to us?  A 90% retention rate would be significantly higher than colleges like Augustana that enroll a similarly student profile.  What kind of financial investment would this require?  Although that is an even more difficult question to answer, the comprehensive effort necessary to improve our relatively strong retention rate would not be free and would likely require some tradeoffs.

Two final thoughts stick out in my mind.  First, while we might have some room to improve, I’d suggest that the we aren’t that far away from our optimum rate.  Second, since there are as many moving parts in this equation as there are students at risk of departure, effective change may result from subtle shifts in institutional culture just as much as it might be influenced by a new program or policy.

So can we improve our average retention rate? Probably.  Will it be easy?  Probably not.  Is it the right thing to do?  Of course.  But we had better not assume that we will see a surge in revenue even if we are successful.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Before the holiday break, I described the evidence from our overall IDEA scores that our students’ Progress on Relevant Objectives (PRO) scores had increased substantively in the past year.  It is clear from looking at our data that this didn’t happen by accident and I hope you have taken a moment or two to take pride in your colleagues.  Admittedly, it is gratifying to see that all of the effort we have put toward maximizing our use of the new IDEA course feedback forms pay off.  So in the spirit of that effort, I want to highlight one other piece of data from our most recent overall report – the low proportion of courses that selected “Developing Creative Capacities” as an essential or important learning objective – and to advocate for more emphasis on that objective.

Of the 12 different learning objectives on the IDEA faculty forms, “Developing Creative Capacities” was selected by only 16% of the courses offered during the fall term – the least common selection (by comparison, 69% of courses indicated “gaining factual knowledge” as an essential or important learning objective).  As you might expect, “developing creative capacities” was chosen almost exclusively by fine arts courses, seemingly reflecting a traditional conception of creative capacities as something reserved for artistic expression.

Yet, as a liberal arts college, it seems that “developing creative capacities” should represent a central element of our educational goals and the culmination of a liberals arts education.  The parenthetical description of “creative capacities” in that objective includes “writing,” “inventing,” and “designing.”  Of course, these skills transcend any specific discipline.  Every time a student tries to make an argument with language, portray a concept visually, solve a problem that doesn’t have a singular solution, or articulate the implications of multiple sources of information on a particular point, their ability to do so hinges on these skills.

Moreover, in the updated version Bloom’s Taxonomy, “creating” is the highest cognitive domain.  Not unlike synthesizing, creating requires each of the skills listed in the preceding levels of the taxonomy (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, and evaluating).  It strikes me that this broadened definition of creating could apply to virtually all senior inquiry projects or other student work expected of a culminating experience.  For a more detailed discussion of creating as a higher-order skill, I’d suggest the IDEA paper that examines Objective #6.

So how do we infuse “developing creative capacities” more fully into our students’ educational experience?  I regularly hear faculty talk about the difficulty that many students exhibit when trying to synthesize disparate ideas and create new knowledge.  It’s complicated work, and I’ll bet that if we were to look back on even the best of our own undergraduate work, we would likely cringe in most cases at what we might have thought at the time was the cutting edge of genius.  Thankfully, this objective doesn’t say, “Mastering Creative Capacities.”  This learning outcome is developmental and will likely be something that most students miss at least as often as they hit.  But three ideas come to mind that I’d like to propose for your consideration . . .

1. Students need practice.  This starts with simple experiences connecting ideas and deriving insights from those connections.  Students will surely be less capable of successfully wielding this key skill when it is needed if they haven’t explicitly been asked to develop it through previous courses and experiences.
2. Students won’t take risks if they don’t trust those who ask them to do it.  Developing creative capacities requires learning from all manner of failure.  Students won’t take the kinds of risk necessary to make real progress if there isn’t space for them to fall down and get back up – and a professor who will help them to their feet.
3. Eventually, you just have to jump.  If nothing else, we are experts at paralysis by analysis.  Although there is always a critical mass of information or content knowledge that students must know before they can begin to effectively connect ideas or form new ones, we sometimes get caught trying to cover more material at the expense of developing thinking skills in students.  Often, it is through trying to integrate and connect ideas without having all of the pieces that teaches the importance of seeking new knowledge and the awareness that there might be details critical to the development of an idea that we don’t yet know.

As you look at the role of your courses in the collective scheme of our students’ growth, I hope you’ll consider the possibility of adding this learning objective.  You may find that you are already doing many of the things in your course that make this happen.  You may find that you need to take a few risks yourself in the design of your course.  Whatever you decide, I hope you will consider the ways that you help students develop creative capacities as complex, higher-order thinking skills.  For our students to succeed in the world they will inherit, I would suggest that our collective future depends on the degree to which we develop their creative capacities to solve problems that we have not yet even seen.

Make it a good day,

Mark

We spend a lot of time talking about the things that we would like to do better.  It’s a natural disposition for educators – continually looking for ways to perfect what is, at its core, a fundamentally imperfect enterprise.  As long as we keep in mind that our efforts to perfect are really about improvement and not about literal perfection, this mindset can cultivate a healthy environment for demonstrably increasing our educational effectiveness.

However – and I admit that I’m probably a repeat offender here – I don’t think we spend enough time reveling in our success.  Often we seem to jump from brushfire to brushfire – sometimes almost frantically so.  Though this might come from a genuinely honorable sense of urgency, I think it tends to make our work more exhausting than gratifying.  Conversely, taking the time to examine and celebrate our successes does two things.  First, it bolsters our confidence in our ability to identify a problem, analyze its cause(s), and implement a successful solution – a confidence that is vital to a culture of perpetual improvement.  Second, it helps us more naturally approach problems through a problem-solving lens.  There is a lot of evidence to show that examining the nature of a successful effort can be more beneficial than simply understanding every painful detail of how we screwed up.

So this last week before Christmas break, I want to celebrate one such success.  If I could hang mistletoe over the campus, I’d likely start doling out kisses (the chocolate kind, or course).  In the four terms since we implemented the IDEA Center course feedback process, you have significantly increased the degree to which students report learning in their courses.  Between fall of 2011 and fall of 2012, the average Progress on Relevant Objectives (PRO) score for a course has increased from a 3.8 to a 4.1.  In addition, on 10 of the 12 individual IDEA learning objectives, students in Augustana courses during the fall of 2012 (last term) reported higher average learning progress scores than students from the overall IDEA data base.  More specifically, the average learning gains from our own courses last term were higher than our overall Augustana average from the previous three terms on 10 out of 12 IDEA learning objectives.

Looking deeper into the data, the evidence continues to support the conclusion that our faculty have steadily improved their teaching.  Over four terms, faculty have reduced the number of objectives they select and narrowed the gap (i.e., variance – for those of you jonesing for statistical parlance) between progress on individual objectives chosen for a given course.  This narrowing precision likely indicates an increasing clarity of educational intent on the part of our faculty.  Moreover, this reduction in selected learning objectives has not come at the expense of higher order thinking objectives that might be considered more difficult to teach.  On the contrary, the selection of individual learning objectives remains similarly distributed – and equally effective – across surface and deep learning objectives.  In addition, students’ responses to the questions regarding “excellent teacher” and “excellent course” went up from 4.2 to 4.3 and from 3.9 to 4.0, respectively.  Finally, when asked whether “as a result of this course, I have more positive feelings about this field of study,” students’ average responses increased from 3.9 to 4.0.

Are there some reasons to challenge my conclusions?  Maybe.  While last year’s participation in the IDEA course feedback process was mandated for all faculty in an effort to develop institutional norms, only about 75% of courses participated this fall.  So it’s possible that the courses that didn’t participate in the fall would have pulled down our overall averages.  Or maybe our faculty have just learned how to manipulate the system and the increased numbers in both PRO scores, individual learning objectives, and teaching methods and styles are nothing more than our improved ability to game the system.

To both of these counter-arguments, in the spirit of the holiday I say (respectfully) . . . humbug.  First of all, although older faculty are traditionally least likely to employ course evaluations (as was the case this fall), I think it is highly unlikely that these faculty are also our worst instructors.  On contrary, many of them are master teachers who have found long ago that they needed to develop other methods of gathering course feedback that matched their own approach to teaching.  Moreover, even if there were some courses taught by senior faculty in which students would have reported lesser degrees of learning, there were courses with lower PRO scores taught by faculty from all classifications.  Second, while there might be some potential for gaming the IDEA system, what I have seen some people refer to as “gaming” has actually been nothing but intentionally designed teaching.  If a faculty member decides to select objective 11, “learning to analyze and critically evaluate ideas, arguments, and points of view,” and then tells the students that this is a focus of the course, asked students to develop this skill through a series of assignments, discussions, projects, or papers, and then explains to students when and how they were making progress on this objective . . . that all sounds to me like plain ol’ good teaching.  So if that is gaming the system or teaching to the test, then (in the words of every kid who has ever played football in the street), “GAME ON!”

Are there other data points in last term’s IDEA aggregate report that we ought to examine and seek to improve?  Sure.  But let’s have that conversation later – maybe in January.  Right now, let’s revel in the knowledge that we now have evidence to show the fruits of our labor to improve our teaching.  You made the commitment to adopt the IDEA course feedback system knowing that it might require us to step up our game.  It did, and you responded in kind.  Actually, you didn’t just meet the challenge – you rose up and proved yourselves to be better than advertised.  So congratulations.  You thoroughly deserve it.  Merry Christmas.

Make it a great day,

Mark