UPDATE: Sometimes I screw up.  This is one of those times.  When I looked at this data and read the report, I misunderstood the meaning of the “attitudes toward integration of religion and spirituality in higher education” scores.  So below I stated, “On average, Augustana students believe that religion and spirituality should be a comparably less integral part of college life than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.” In actuality, our students reported the opposite.  It turns out the the questions in this scale are framed in the negative and thus the scores need to be reversed in order to understand them properly.  One could argue that the report isn’t quite clear on how to interpret this scale . . . but I still missed it.  The rest of this blog post stands and I think is still worth the pixels on the screen.  My apologies.  Mark

___________________________________________

At one time or another, I’ll bet you’ve heard the old advice about discussing religion or politics. As I remember it, it boils down to one word: don’t.  These days you only need to turn to CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News to see what can happen when folks go down that road.  Interestingly, these flailing pundits demonstrate perfectly why we should care so much about developing our students’ ability to effectively and civilly converse about personal beliefs, especially when talking to someone with whom they don’t agree.  Because no one can make where they live a better place if they can’t interact across all manner of difference to solve complicated problems and live better together.

The commitment to developing this attribute in our students is one of the core motivations of those who participate in the Interfaith Understanding student group, the Honest Conversation series, and Salon (among others).  Bringing disparate people together for the specific purpose of discussing conflicting personal beliefs can have a powerful impact on learning important skills like perspective-taking, suspending judgment, and reflecting instead of reacting.  Of course, it can also be uncomfortable, destabilizing, and just plain hard.  But that is exactly what good educating is – precisely because learning so often comes through stretching students beyond what is safe and familiar.

Last year Augustana participated in a national survey to better understand the impact of our efforts to foster a community where these conversations can happen.  The survey – the Campus Religious and Spirituality Climate Survey (CRSCS) assess three dimensions of a campus environment that might influence a religious and spiritual climate of tolerance, interaction, and impact.

1. The structural worldview diversity: Perceptions of the proportional representation of various religious and non-religious groups on campus.
2. The psychological climate: Perceptions and attitudes between and among different worldview groups.
3. The behavioral climate: Formal and informal interactions among students of different worldviews.

We surveyed sophomores and juniors in March and April of 2013.  Although our response rate wasn’t as high as we would have liked (124 useable responses), we got enough data to make some inferences about our students’ experiences in this area and how those experiences might set up our next efforts to strengthen this aspect of student learning.

The crux of the results suggest:

• On average, Augustana students perceive their campus community to be comparably more homogenous than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
• On average, Augustana students are comparably more accepting and express more appreciative views of students from alternate faith or belief systems (e.g., Muslim or agnostic students) than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
• On average, our students perceive there to be less conflict or separation between students from differing faith systems and worldviews on this campus than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
• On average, Augustana students have had challenging or stimulating experiences with students from different worldviews more often and believe that their college experience has altered their religious or spiritual worldview more substantially than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.
• On average, Augustana students believe that religion and spirituality should be a comparably less integral part of college life than students at other CRSCS participant institutions.

Overall, Augustana students’ appear to be more interfaith literate and appreciative of other worldviews and belief systems than students at the other participant institutions during 2012-13.  This seems to be reflected in both the degree to which students appear to be accepting of other faith or worldview groups and the degree to which they perceive the climate to be less divided.  Moreover, Augustana students seem to perceive a greater benefit from their interactions across faith and worldview differences than students at other participating institutions.  Taken together, these findings suggest that we are making progress toward 1) creating an environment conducive to a positive college experience for students of all faiths or worldviews and 2) achieving the college-wide learning outcomes regarding intercultural competence.

Interestingly, despite the students’ own comparably more positive experiences and educational growth as a result of interfaith encounters, they seem reticent to believe that their college experience should include more integration of religious and spiritual issues.  Even in the context of attending a private, church-affiliated liberal arts college, Augustana students seem to be more likely to think that the religious and spiritual worldview sphere should be relegated to a private domain and not brought into the classroom or the public sphere.

The combination of these findings suggests to me that the groundwork may be in place for us to more explicitly take ownership of interfaith literacy as a critical element of intercultural competence and make it more a part of the mainstream learning experience.  This groundwork seems to be in place not because the data suggests that students are asking for a heightened emphasis on interfaith literacy, but because we have data to show students that their experiences have impacted their own growth.  In my mind, this might be one way of shifting their own engagement in this conversation – by showing them that they have already benefitted from the thing that they think they shouldn’t do.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Since the US News & World Report rankings came out last week, a number of people have asked me, “What do you make of this stuff?”  To be frank, my attitude toward college rankings in general swings from mild amusement to seething frustration.  Thankfully, I’m not alone in this opinion – Slate just published a particularly humorous dig at the whole rankings hubbub.  Nonetheless, I thought it might be helpful to share a couple of observations from this year’s ranking of Augustana College by digging a little deeper into the mean and method behind this particular “madness.”

1. US News & World Report continues to focus almost entirely on inputs and perception instead of outcomes.  So factors like students’ incoming ACT/SAT scores, the proportion of applications accepted for admission, several measures of financial resources, and the opinion of other college presidents largely determine the final rankings.  As a result, the wealthiest colleges tend to sit atop the rankings.  US News  has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on this approach, so don’t expect it to change any time soon.
2. Even though the ranking number is the one that everyone seems to pay attention to, all of the ranks are derived from an absolute score that ranges from 0 to 100.  With more than 250 colleges to rank in our category of national liberal arts colleges, you can imagine that there are a lot of ties.  This year, Augustana’s absolute score (54) is exactly the same as it was last year.  Despite the absence of change, our rank dropped from 97 last year to 100 this year on the list.
3. Moreover, we sit within a cluster of 21 other colleges that scored within two points on either side of our absolute score (56-52).  These schools range in ranking from 94 to 110.  It’s a good group of colleges with several names that you’d recognize as institutions with which we often compare ourselves.  And it makes sense to think that we would share a lot of similarities with some of these schools, after all we’ve been sitting within spitting distance of each other for almost 30 years.

But since the US News rankings were first conceived, a lot has changed.  We have fundamentally altered the way that we assess ourselves, shifting from determining our self-worth based on the inputs that US News uses to assessing our educational effectiveness based upon the results or outcomes of an Augustana education.  So is there anything from the US News rankings that might be worth noting?

There is one interesting tidbit that isn’t listed on the US News web site but is available to institutions upon request.  US News creates rank scores for each of the eight sub-categories (peer assessment, financial resources, graduation and retention, student selectivity, faculty resources, alumni giving, graduation rate performance, and high school counselor opinion) that they combine to create a total score.  Most (6 out of 8) sub-category rankings fall between 80 and 134.  Our financial resources rank (160) is a bit lower than the rest.  All this, especially our comparatively lower financial resource rank, makes the final sub-category ranking all that much more interesting and, dare I say, impressive.

The one sub-category left is called Graduation Rate Performance.  This sub-category recognizes any potential difference between a schools’ predicted graduation rate (based on the characteristics of the incoming students and the financial where-with-all of the institution) and the actual graduation rate in a particular year.  The larger the positive gap between the predicted and actual graduation rate, the higher the rank score – reflecting the degree to which the institution is making the most of its capacities to educate and graduate its students.

• What was our predicted graduation rate?    67%
• What was our actual graduation rate?          78%

Augustana’s graduation rate performance rank this year is 19.  In other words, we took a decent, albeit imperfect, group of about 640 students and graduated about 70 more of them than would be expected given the average incoming academic preparation and family financial status of the group.

That seems to be worth celebrating.

Is there anything else worth noting in the US News rankings?  Not really.

Make it a good day,

Mark

One of the main reasons we encourage freshmen to find and join student groups that fit their interests is because we believe that connecting freshmen to other students based on a common interest helps speed the acclimation process and leads to a stronger sense of belonging on campus.  After all, the dominant theories in the study of college students assert that student involvement in campus life matters for a host of important reasons and lead to higher rates of persistence and learning.

One way to track our student involvement in campus life is to gather information about our students’ participation patterns in co-curricular activities.  Thus, we included several questions in the new end-of-the-first-year survey that ask about the degree to which freshmen found student groups or clubs that fit their interests and whether they participated in a variety of activities such as greek organizations, intercollegiate athletics, music ensembles, or any other student club or organization.

One assumption we make about involvement’s impact on persistence and learning is that the driving factor exists simply in the act of becoming and staying involved.  In other words, we often don’t think so much about the nature of that involvement (i.e., the nature of the interactions and experiences that occur as a result of that involvement) as we do about the mere existence or absence of it.  If you think you smell a hint of foreshadowing here . . . breathe deeply (sorry for the mixed metaphor!).

When we analyzed the data we collected from our freshmen last spring, we tested these two potentially competing hypotheses.  Essentially, was a students’ sense of belonging on campus primarily impacted by the existence of involvement or by the nature of that involvement?  The results might surprise you (cue more ominous foreshadowing music).

Of all the questions asking about the existence of involvement (whether they participated in athletics, music groups, student clubs, greek organizations, and the degree to which they found student groups that fit their interests), the only one that produced a statistically significant positive effect on our students’ sense of belonging was athletic participation.

The rest of the measures of the existence of involvement . . . nothing, nada, zippo.

However, several questions that asked about the nature of students’ interaction with others on campus – an unavoidable byproduct of involvement – produced statistically significant effects even after taking into account the existence of student involvement in all of the ways assessed above.

• My out-of-class experiences have helped me develop a deeper understanding of how I relate to others.
• About how often have you had serious conversations with students from a different race/ethnicity, economic background, religious beliefs, or political opinions than your own?

Interestingly, several questions that asked about students’ curricular experiences also impacted students’ sense of belonging on campus.

• In your courses, how often were you asked to examine the strengths and weaknesses of your own views on a topic or issue?
• How often did faculty ask you to apply your learning to address societal problems or issues?

There appears to me to be some possibly important overlap between these two sets of questions.  All four of these questions ask about experiences that require empathy, suspending judgement, and learning to see issues through a perspective other than one’s own.  I wonder if these kinds of experiences may actually perpetuate a deeper, more meaningful sense of belonging and fit.  Simply finding a group of people who already share one’s interests suggests that the individual looking to fit in doesn’t need to do anything to make the fit happen.  As a result, they don’t have to commit to grow or change.  I suspect this allows them to maintain something of an emotional escape hatch (e.g., “if this doesn’t work out, so what”).  But if fitting in necessitates a measure of empathy, suspension of judgement, and perspective-taking, I wonder if these behaviors also increase the likelihood of commitment, thereby producing a deeper sense of belonging and fit.

The fact that an increase in any of these four experiences paralleled an increase in a student’s sense of belonging on campus suggests to me that the nature of a student’s involvement may be more important than the mere existence of it.  Thus, encouraging someone to find and join a student group that shares similar interests, while it might be beneficial on some level, may not necessarily be enough to develop a deeper sense of belonging on campus.  Instead, it appears that interactions that force students to encounter and interact across some dimension of difference toward a successful conclusion can play a critical part in our students’ capacity for fitting in at Augustana College.  Like many of the other issues we are thinking about as we focus more precisely on student learning, when we talk about maximizing student involvement, let’s remember to ask ourselves, “To what end?  What do we want our students to learn and how do we want them to grow as a result of this experience?”

Make it a good day,

Mark

Sometimes our students surprise me.  Over the last year, I’ve noticed how many of them really believe in the advantages of a liberal arts education.  For some, their experience at Augustana opened their eyes to the benefits of the liberal arts, but many of them seem to have chosen Augustana because of its liberal arts mission. Even when I’ve been suspicious that these students were just repeating the sales pitch they heard on their campus visit, I’ve been impressed with how often they have emphatically argued the merits of making connections between ideas and disciplines to be liberally educated and better prepared for life after college.

So where do our students get this belief in a liberal arts education?  Is it an artifact of their college search?  Does it just magically happen?  Or is it because they experience the benefits of making connections between disciplines in their course work?  It seems to me that the answer to this question might be particularly helpful, since it would give us another clue into how we can build a truly comprehensive learning experience and help more students make the most of their Augustana career.

One question on the senior survey might give us a glimpse of an answer.  In each of the last two years, we’ve asked graduating seniors, “In your non-major courses, about how often were you asked to put together ideas or concepts from different courses when completing assignments or during class discussions?”  They were given five response options that include “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” or “very often.”  For the purposes of quantitative analysis, we code these responses in order from 1 to 5.

Over the last two years, students’ have responded with a resounding “sometimes.”  The average response in 2012 was 3.25, while in 2013 it was 3.17.  Furthermore, the standard deviations from each year (a measure of the degree to which the responses are spread across the range of options versus concentrated around the average score) were fairly narrow (.81 and .85) and almost identical.

So what should we make of these data?  Do they suggest some dissonance between what we claim we do and what actually happens in our non-major classes?  Maybe only certain students are more likely to have this experience?  Or are these mean scores right where they should be?

In looking deeper into this data, it appears that there aren’t a lot of clear patterns across major types.  And I suppose it doesn’t make sense that there should be such patterns because students’ non-major courses would be partially similar no matter the major and partially all over the place based on their own interests.  Frankly, this is an item where I don’t think looking at the average score tells the whole story.  If we think about the kind of educational experience that we claim students will get from us, it seems that we would want students to say that they were asked to put together ideas from different disciplines regularly.  Yet I don’t think it’s realistic to think that they should respond “very often.”  No matter whether that translates into a “sometimes” or an “often” for a given student as they fill out this survey, my point is that I think we could be satisfied with an average score halfway between 3 and 4.  More importantly, I don’t think we want any students to say “never” or ” rarely.”  After looking at how the students’ responses were distributed across the range of response options, we can take pride in the fact that the vast majority of students indicated “sometimes,” “often,” or “very often.”  Unfortunately, in both of the last two graduating classes, about 80 students didn’t meet that threshold.

I don’t think we can realistically expect that a year where no student selects “rarely” or “never” to this question.  However, I do think that we can intentionally infuse integrating cross-disciplinary perspectives into our work – as clearly many of you do already.  New learning becomes real and has a better chance of becoming permanent when the learner can attach it to something that they already know.  It could be another discipline, a current event, or a common experience.  In the humanities, great literature often comes alive for students when they realize that people have been wrestling with the same difficult questions for hundreds of years.  In the sciences, concepts and the implications of natural laws come alive when students see how these abstract realities shape the way we live and the choices we make.

Clearly, we are doing a lot of things right at Augustana College.  We have more than ample evidence to prove it.  But we also know that we can strive to be even better.  One way to do that is by intentionally finding ways to connect what students are learning in your class to what they have already learned elsewhere.  This way we have a better chance of making the students’ learning “take” and becoming something that permanently shapes the person they become.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Every year about this time, it seems as if the sleepy grounds on which we walk all summer magically spawn a new class of students, and within a few days they are planted in our classrooms, staring at us from well-worn desks with looks ranging from bright-eyed excitement to bleary-eyed befuddlement. But no matter the particular mix of personalities we find in our classes on the first day of the fall term, we all throw ourselves into the messy work of educating, trying to help all students strive to learn, find their niche, and embrace their college learning experience.

So what is the mysterious formula that lights the fire for student success?  On the one hand, we all know enough to know that such an overly simplistic question is a bit naive. Educating is jagged and salty business.  There is no magic elixir.  Anyone who claims otherwise is a certifiable charlatan.  Instead, the way to think about influencing success is to focus on likelihoods. Thus the questions we ask should be about what we can do to set in motion the right combination of experiences and what we can do to cultivate the right responses to those experiences so that all students – no matter their unique characteristics or predispositions – are most likely to take their fate into their own hands, succeed, stay, and ultimately graduate.

Last year we introduced a survey to freshmen at the end of their first year that was in part intended to help us identify the kind of experiences that might increase the likelihood of first year success.  While it was modeled after the senior survey, we introduced a number of new questions that specifically focused on experiences unique to freshmen (e.g., LSFY, first-year advising, life in the residence halls).  We also asked several outcome questions, one of which was, “If you could relive your college decision, would you choose Augustana again?”

I want to share with you two student experience questions that turned out to be statistically significant predictors of students’ saying that they would “definitely” choose Augustana again – one relatively effective proxy for determining a student’s success in college. And since the findings I’m going to share take into account their pre-college academic preparation, gender, race/ethnicity, and family financial status, these findings likely apply regardless of differences in a few basic but important demographic characteristics.

The two questions that emerged as statistically significant predictors were:

1. “How often did your faculty emphasize setting high expectations for your own learning and growth?” (never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often)
2. “Faculty and staff at Augustana treated me like an individual.” (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree)

What strikes me most about this finding is that it captures a fundamental truth in college impact research: the principle of challenge and support.  An educational endeavor can’t maximize learning and success unless it creates an environment that a) challenges students to push themselves beyond marginal, rudimentary gains, and b) supports their affective well-being as they take the risk of pushing themselves so that they can continue to learn and grow in the face of difficulty, or even the occasional failure. The findings from our own data suggest that our freshmen who said that they would “definitely” choose Augustana again were also students who said that faculty often (or very often) emphasized setting high expectations for their own learning and growth AND agreed (or strongly agreed) that faculty and staff at Augustana treated them like an individual.

There are a myriad of ways to concretely emphasize to students the importance of setting high expectations for themselves while at the same time treating them like an individual. In my few interactions with freshmen during the last several days of Fall Connection, I’ve been struck by the degree to which they want to know what they can do to succeed. Yet in many cases, they don’t know the questions that would uncover the information they need.  I suspect that we would all go a long way toward helping students discover those questions, as well as the answers to them, if we intentionally frame our interactions with students to communicate an aspiration to challenge within a cradle of support.  Stated a different way, this means that we specifically instill in students our belief in their ability to succeed even as we exhort them to strive for a high bar.

Deep and meaningful learning is risky.  If your students trust you to be their learning guide, they will work harder than you – or they – thought they could.  And that will substantially increase their – and our – likelihood of success.

Good luck with your first week of the 2013-14 Fall Term.

Make it a good day,

Mark

John ‘Hannibal’ Smith, The A-Team

When Augustana implemented Augie Choice several years ago, the goal was fairly straightforward – increase the proportion of students who participate in study abroad, internships, or undergraduate research.  Not surprisingly, Augie Choice worked.  The proportion of our students who participate in one of those three ventures has increased dramatically. Also not surprisingly, the majority of the students using Augie Choice have put those funds toward studying abroad.

But the measure by which we evaluate Augie Choice shouldn’t be restricted to mere increases in participation.  There might be other factors, like the increasingly emphatic public rhetoric about the best ways for students to prepare for a competitive job market, that are driving participation in experiential learning opportunities.  Instead, the ideal way to evaluate the effectiveness of Augie Choice is to examine the degree to which it has driven an increase in participation among students who would not have participated otherwise.  Obviously, in actuality this is sort of impossible (stats people call this the problem of the counterfactual – most of the rest of us call it the allure of the alternate universe), so the next best way to get at this question is to look at participation patterns among those who historically did not participate and see if these numbers have changed since the implementation of Augie Choice.

In the case of study abroad, one historically under-represented population is students who come from lower-income backgrounds.  So as a part of our recent program review of international programs, Allen Bertsche and I looked at several years of study abroad participation data to see if the proportion of low-income students studying abroad had increased significantly since Augie Choice was implemented.

Here are the actual numbers.  The percentages (in parentheses) are the proportion of all study abroad participants in the corresponding year.

As you can see, Augie Choice seems to have contributed to a substantial increase in study abroad participation rates among lower income students.  Between 2009/10 and 2012/13, the proportion of study abroad participants from the lowest income group (Pell qualifiers) nearly tripled, and the proportion of government subsidized loan qualifiers jumped by about 50%.

Pretty cool, eh?

Of course there are many more questions to pose regarding Augie Choice.  For example, since we know that participation doesn’t automatically produce learning, what exactly are we doing to make sure that students make substantive meaning out of their experiences?  What are we doing to ensure that they integrate that meaning into their continued growth and development?

This is a deeply complicated question – albeit not beyond our capability.  As we have done with other complex initiatives like re-envisioning general education and introducing senior inquiry, we have already proven our ability to grapple with complicated challenges and produce results that demonstrably improve student learning.  But in order to make the most out of these experiential learning opportunities, we had to create a mechanism that spurred all students to participate.  Augie Choice did that.  Well done, everybody.

Make it a good day,

Mark

One particularly useful question from our senior survey asks students to respond to the statement, “I am certain that my post-graduate plans are a good fit for who I am and where I want my life to go.”  Students have the choice of five options from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” and for analytical purposes those five options are assigned scores from 1 to 5.  The average score for the 2012 senior class was 4.06, which roughly translates to the response option “agree.”  On first glance, that seems pretty good.

But as with any examination of a large dataset, an overall average score can be deceptive.  For example, all the students’ responses could have been clustered between 4.00 and 4.10 – suggesting that no matter the major or the individual’s post-graduate plan (grad school, work, volunteer circus clown, etc.), all of our students were pretty certain that their plans for life after college were a good fit.  However, it is also possible that just under half the students chose “neutral” (scored as a 3) while just over half chose “strongly agree” (scored as a 5) – suggesting a troubling disparity between two groups of Augustana students.

So last week we began to dig deeper into the data beneath that overall score of 4.06.  First, we divided the responses based upon whether the student intended to go to grad school or intended to go directly into the workforce.  Then, we looked at those two groups across seven categories of majors – humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, fine arts, business, and education.

It turns out that our overall average masks a substantial gap between students who intend to go to grad school and students who intend to go into the job market.  For students going to grad school (161), their certainty of post-graduate plan fit was 4.49.  For students going into the workforce (352), their certainty of post-graduate plan fit was 3.97.

Interestingly, this gap largely repeats itself across all of the major categories, although the gap among biological science students was a little larger and the gaps among physical science and business students was a little smaller.  I’ve put all of that data into the table below.

So what should we take from it?  First of all, I’d suggest that it’s entirely realistic to expect students going to grad school to be more certain of their post-graduate plan fit.  After all, they seem to know what they want to do enough to know that additional and specifically focused schooling is necessary.  Moreover, in many cases they probably know the exact career they plan to pursue and have long since investigated the path required to get there.  They also possess the intellectual capabilities to get to a point where their career plan has been validated by their grad school acceptance letter – an additional affirmation that they are on the right path.

Second, although we need to be cautious about making too much of some of these subgroup averages (for example, the mean score of 0.00 for education majors intending to go directly to graduate school is explained by the fact that no education majors intended to go to grad school), we should remember that this dataset includes responses from virtually all of our 2012 graduates.  As such, these scores accurately represent the experiences of an entire class of seniors.

I think these numbers can inform our efforts to improve the degree to which we set up our students to succeed after college.  Students who intended to go into the workforce and majored in the fine arts (3.50) and the humanities (3.78) indicated the lowest levels of career certainty.  By comparison, the highest levels of career certainty among those who intended to go into the workforce were education (4.29) and physical sciences (4.17) majors.  This gap is large enough to indicate that the difference between the two groups cannot be attributed to mere chance.  Some of you might suggest that the relatively low certainty among fine arts and humanities students shouldn’t be surprising given that these majors either don’t have direct links to particular professions or have been long associated with the stereotype of the “the starving artist.”  In both cases graduate school provides a clearer career path, and that likely explains the higher certainty for students from those majors going to grad school.

I fear that the students who need assistance with career planning early in the course of their major are the ones who are too often the least likely to get it.  These students are often in majors where faculty have little experience outside of academia and are therefore less likely to know as much about how to help a student translate the knowledge and skills developed in that major across a wide variety of career paths.  This seems like a perfect opportunity for faculty in the humanities and fine arts to partner with the CEC to lay down early guiding pathways for these students and to help correct the erroneous assumptions about the lack of career options available to students in these majors.

In addition, I’d suggest that this is not something that we should expect the faculty to solve by merely adding another class or some other one-off experience.  Although we can share some of this information with students through short presentations, this information translates best when it is repeatedly infused into many different experiences – both inside and outside of the classroom.  In the end, that is the epitome of the liberal arts; that we take the fullest advantage of the comprehensive learning environment to help students make connections across a wide range of educational contexts and disciplines.  In so doing, each of our students, no matter their life aspirations, are well prepared to succeed in life after college.

Make it a good day,

Mark