There is a lot going on this week, so I hope I can make this brief! (I know, I know . . .)

Last week I shared the second round of results from our study of Augustana students’ changing (or not changing) motivational orientations.  The first layer of results was a mixed bag . . . our students inclination toward extrinsic motivation decreased, but their inclination toward intrinsic motivation after four years remained unchanged.  The second layer of results found that, perhaps surprisingly to some, none of our measures of curricular experiences impacted our students’ inclination toward intrinsic motivation.  Instead, the primary driver of an increased intrinsic motivation orientation was our students’ perception of how much their out-of-class experiences had impacted their understanding of themselves.

But it was the other finding highlighted in my last post that I thought was particularly appropriate for the upcoming week. In addition to the impact of students’ out-of-class experiences, we found that the degree to which our students said that “Symposium Day activities influenced the way I now think about real world issues” significantly predicted (in a statistical sense) an increase in our students’ inclination toward intrinsic motivation.  In responding to my post one reader raised a good question, asking if we could discern whether these students’ engagement in Symposium Day was a reflection of their own dispositions or if this engagement in Symposium Day was a function of faculty and staff educational designs.  In essence, this question goes to the heart of our effort to tease out relationships in our data that we can rely on to design influential change.  And it gets at a pretty important issue for higher education folks: Can our educational efforts alter the course of our student’s learning or is their learning a function of the dispositions and abilities that they bring with them to college?

Of course, the question I just posed is really a false dichotomy.  It would be pretty hard to believe that any college’s educational efforts could completely overrun the dispositions that our students bring with them to college.  But we can test whether the things that we do light a spark that wouldn’t otherwise appear, functioning as an accelerator for those who are already heading in the right direction or as a pair of jumper cables for those whose engine just won’t seem to turn over.  Sparing the automotive metaphors, we can examine our data to find out if integrating learning experiences is actually improving our students’ growth.

So do we have any way to identify predictors of our students’ response to the statement “Symposium Day activities influenced the way I now think about real world issues”?  In fact, we do.  In our freshman year survey, we also ask our first-year students to respond (along five-response options ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree) to the statement, “My instructors integrated themes or ideas from Symposium Day into their courses.”  Although this data comes from a different set of students than the senior survey data, I think its reasonable to suggest that whatever we find in our first-year data is applicable to all Augustana students.

It turns out that the degree to which first-year students say that their instructors integrated Symposium Day into their courses is a powerful predictor of the degree to which students say that Symposium Day activities influenced the way that they now think about real world issues, even after accounting for these students’ pre-college dispositions and traits.  While I wasn’t too surprised that this statistical relationship would appear, I was impressed by the size of the effect.

To put it simply, it seems pretty likely that when instructors integrate Symposium Day into their courses students come away from Symposium Day genuinely influenced by what they’ve heard.  And based on the analysis I shared last week, it may also be true that integrating courses with Symposium Day indirectly impacts our students’ development of a stronger inclination toward intrinsic motivation.  Maybe some students arrive at a presentation only because they have been required to attend. But by the time they leave, it appears that the chances are good that they will come away with something that sticks.

Well, I’ll be … who’d a thunk it!  Wednesday of this week just happens to be Symposium Day.  It isn’t too late to find a way to link your course to something happening on that day. Integrating learning experiences makes a difference.  More and more, we have evidence to show it.

Make it a good day (today and Wednesday),

Mark