This year we tried something new with our freshman survey. Instead of administering the entire survey in the spring term, we split it into two pieces; one part administered in the middle of the year and one part administered at the end of the year, concentrating our questions in the mid-year survey on academic and social acclimation and focusing the end-of-the-year survey on learning and development. This allowed us to get much better data from struggling students, who often are no longer enrolled in the spring. It also allowed us to link the conceptual emphases of each part of the survey with what students were more likely to be experiencing at the time when they took the survey.
Over the last couple of months I’ve shared some of the findings from the mid-year survey -findings that can help us improve our support of students’ acclimation to college life. In this post I’d like to share some early learning and development findings from the end-of-the-first-year survey. The two items below are a few of the new items we added to the end-of-the-first-year survey as potential outcomes of the first year. You’ll notice in the phrasing of the questions that we approached these outcomes developmentally. In other words, we don’t conceive of freshman year outcomes as absolute thresholds that have to be met at the end of the first year. Instead, we think of the first year as a part of a larger process in which students move at different speeds and at different times. In the end, we are trying to get a sense of the degree to which freshmen believe that they have made progress toward one skill and one disposition that undergird a successful college experience.
|
During the year I got better at balancing my academics with my out-of-class activities.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Over the past academic year, I have developed a better sense of who I am and where I want my life to go.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
In both cases, there appears to be reason to smile and reason to frown. On one hand, about two-thirds of the freshmen respondents agree or strongly agree with these statements. While one could quibble about whether some of these students were already fully capable of balancing their academic and out-of-class responsibilities or already had a strong sense of self, direction, and purpose, I think it is fair to suggest that students are more likely responding to the phrasing about their own perceptions of personal growth.
On the other hand, about a third of our students indicated neutral, disagree, or strongly disagree to these questions. While there are probably more than few potential explanations that are outside of our control, I suspect that future analysis, once all of our data is cleaned and recoded for analytic purposes (that is fancy talk for “turned into numbers that statistical geeks like to use to play in the statistics sandbox”), will help us understand some of the experiences that positively and negatively predict students’ responses to these items.
Then comes the really hard work. What do we do with that knowledge? I hope we will do what we are learning to do more often: change our practices and/or policies to improve our students development and learning. So stay tuned as we unpack all of our new data. And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE if you have any freshmen in your classes, implore them to complete the freshmen survey that has been emailed to them several times over the last few weeks.
Make it a good day,
Mark