Looking back, we must have been a little bit clairvoyant to start a four-year study like this in 2012. After all, how else does one explain the serendipity of having such robust data on our students’ intercultural competence growth precisely when current events on campus and across the country seem to epitomize our societal need for more substantive intercultural skills?

On Friday afternoon, I presented the second of three Friday Conversations focused on our examination of the four-year study of our students that concluded in the spring of 2016. If you missed the first presentation, you can see the power point slides and get a sense of our conversation in the subsequent Delicious Ambiguity post from last fall. In essence, last fall we focused only on the nature of our students’ change and how it might differ across various types of students.

Last week, I shared what variables we had found seem to correlate, and might therefore predict, the change that we see in our students. Again, if you missed it, you can click on the following hyperlinks to see the power point slides and look over the final table of regression results.

In essence, what we found mirrors what researchers who examine the impact of college experiences on student learning outcomes consistently find. Mere participation in various experiences isn’t enough. Instead, it is the nature of what happens within those experiences, and the degree to which those experiences are designed to address specific learning goals, that matters most. In this case, the degree to which students’ out-of-class experiences helped them develop a deeper understanding of how to interact with someone who might disagree with them turned out to be the largest and most pervasive factor in driving our students’ intercultural competence growth. Importantly, when we accounted for participation in specific experiences and accounted for the quality of those experience (i.e., what happened within those experiences), whether or not the student participated in a particular experience didn’t matter.  Instead, almost every bit of our findings pointed toward the nature of their experience across their college career.

Take the time to scroll through the linked slides and scan the final table of results above. I think you’ll see that there are clearly ways that we can implement educational design elements across a variety of experiences that will improve our students’ intercultural competence growth.

At our third Friday Conversation focused on this topic (April 7th), we will tackle the biggest challenge: what changes are we willing to implement based on our findings that should help us improve what we do? It’s all well and good to stroke our chins and puzzle over the data. But the mark of a great college is the willingness and ability to jump in, make a change, and commit to it. I hope you’ll join us in April. In the meantime, if you have questions about the findings, the study, or the implications we’ve noticed, don’t hesitate to post them below.

Make it a good day,

Mark