This is a massively busy week at Augie. We had a packed house of high school students visiting on Monday (I’ve never seen the cafeteria so full of people ever!), the Board of Trustees will gather on campus for meetings on Thursday and Friday, and hundreds of alumni and family will arrive for Homecoming over the weekend. With all of this hustle and bustle, you probably wouldn’t have noticed three unassuming researchers from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) quietly talking to faculty, staff, and students on Monday and Tuesday. They were on campus to find out more about our interfaith programs, experiences, and emphasis over the past several years.
Apparently, we are doing something right when it comes to improving interfaith understanding at Augustana. Back in the fall of 2015, our first-year cohort joined college freshmen from 122 colleges and universities around the country to participate in a 4-year study of interfaith understanding development. The study was designed to collect data from those students at the beginning of the first year, during the fall of the second year, and in the spring of the fourth year. In addition to charting the ways in which these students changed during college, the study was also constructed to identify the experiences and environments that influence this change.
As the research team examined the differences between the first-year and second-year data, an intriguing pattern began to emerge. Across the entire study, students didn’t change very much. This wasn’t so much of a surprise, really, since the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education had found the same thing. However, unlike students across the entire study, Augustana students consistently demonstrated improvement on most of the measures in the study. This growth was particularly noticeable in areas like appreciative knowledge of different worldviews, appreciative attitudes toward different belief systems, and global citizenship. Although the effect sizes weren’t huge, a consistent pattern of subtle but noticeable growth suggested that something good might be happening at Augustana.
However, using some fancy statistical tricks to generate an asterisk or two (denoting statistical significance) doesn’t necessarily help us much in practical terms. Knowing that something happened doesn’t tell us how we might replicate it or how we might do it even better. This is where the qualitative ninjas need to go to work and talk to people (something us quant nerds haven’t quite figured out how to do yet). Guided by the number-crunching, the real gems of knowledge are more likely to be unearthed through focus groups and interviews where researchers can delve deep into the experiences and observations of folks on the ground.
So what did our visiting team of researchers find? They hope to have a report of their findings for us in several months. So far all I could glean from them is that Augustana is a pretty campus with A LOT of steps.
But there is a set of responses from the second-year survey data that that might point in a direction worth contemplating. There is a wonderfully titled grouping of items called “Provocative Encounters with Worldview Diversity,” from which the responses to three statements seem to set our students’ experience apart from students across the entire study as well as students at institutions with a similar Carnegie Classification (Baccalaureate institutions – arts and sciences). In each case, we see a difference in the proportion of students who responded “all the time” or “frequently.”
- In the past year, how often have you had class discussions that challenged you to rethink your assumptions about another worldview?
- Augustana students: 51%
- Baccalaureate institutions: 43%
- All institutions in the study: 33%
- In the past year, how often have you felt challenged to rethink your assumptions about another worldview after someone explained their worldview to you?
- Augustana students: 44%
- Baccalaureate institutions: 34%
- All institutions in the study: 27%
- In the past year, how often have you had a discussion with someone of another worldview that had a positive influence on your perceptions of that worldview?
- Augustana students: 48%
- Baccalaureate institutions: 45%
- All institutions in the study: 38%
In the past several years, there is no question that we have been trying to create these kinds of interactions through Symposium Day, Sustained Dialogue, course offerings, a variety of co-curricular programs, and increased diversity among our student body. Some of the thinking behind these efforts dates back six or seven years when we could see from our Wabash National Study Data and our prior NSSE data that our students reported relatively fewer serious conversations with people who differed from them in race/ethnicity and/or beliefs/values. Since a host of prior research has found that these kinds of serious conversations across difference are key to developing intercultural competence (a skill that certainly includes interfaith understanding), it made a lot of sense for us to refine what we do so that we might improve our students’ gains on the college’s learning outcomes.
The response to the items above suggests to me that the conditions we are trying to create are indeed coming together. Maybe, just maybe, we have successfully designed elements of the Augustana experience that are producing the learning that we aspire to produce.
It will be very interesting to see what the research team ultimately reports back to us. But for now, I think it’s worth noting that there seems to be early evidence that we have implemented intentionally designed experiences that very well might be significantly impacting our students’ growth.
How about that?!
Make it a good day,
Mark