Learning Communities Research and Practice (LCRP - E-Journal, Washington Center at The Evergreen State College Research)
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How Do Learning Communities Affect First-Year Latino Students?
Get PDFDo learning communities with pedagogies of active learning, collaborative learning, and integration of course material affect the learning, achievement, and persistence of first-year Latino university students? The data for this project was obtained from a survey of 1,330 first-year students in the First-Year Learning Community Program at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in fall 2005. Using survey data combined with student background characteristics and multivariate analyses, the findings reveal that learning communities had a positive effect on all students’ first semester GPA, and that learning community practices, especially collaborative learning, benefit Latino students. The study also proposes a technique for estimating the impact of learning communities on Latino students
Case Managers and the Freshman Academy Learning Community: The Results of Involving a Variety of Campus Personnel in First-Year Student Mentoring
Get PDFJohnson C. Smith University, a historically black university in North Carolina, created a Case Manager Program for their Freshman Academy Learning Community. This case study describes how the program was designed, implemented, and assessed. Case Managers are neither faculty nor student affairs professionals yet they are an integral part of the Freshman Academy initiative where thirty students are blocked into a cohort, each enrolled in 15 or 16 credit hours—one of which is the weekly freshman orientation class designed to help students transition from high school. Case managers assist team leaders and faculty members with students who need additional support or guidance related to class attendance, accessing campus resources, referrals for services, and co-curricular activities. A discussion of mentoring as a student engagement strategy to promote successful student persistence and retention is included as are implications for mentoring practice and research in the first year of college
Beyond Improved Retention: Building Value-Added Success on a Broad Foundation
Get PDFMany have documented the positive benefits of Living and Learning Communities (LLCs), but creating an environment that truly integrates living and learning across campus can be a challenge. In this paper we chronicle an LLC program that was intentionally built upon a broad foundation. By including faculty, staff, and student leader representation from across the campus - from admissions and academic affairs to student engagement, residence life, and enrollment management - Cabrini College has created a program that has gone beyond the numerical targets of increased retention and increased academic success. We believe the program has created transformational experiences for many student participants, and that these experiences are the result of the LLC’s integrated design. After providing a history of the program and its unique institutional structure, and offering suggestions for other institutions designing LLCs, we present both quantitative and qualitative measures of success.
Richard D. Gebauer is the Director of the First-Year Experience at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
Nancy L. Watterson is an Associate Professor, Social Justice, at Cabrini College.
Eric Malm is an Associate Professor of Economics and Business at Cabrini College.
Michelle Filling-Brown is an Assistant Professor of English at Cabrini College.
John W. Cordes is an Associate Professor in Communication at Cabrini College
Improving Academic Success for Undecided Students: A First-Year Seminar/Learning Community Approach
Get PDFUndecided undergraduate students are often considered to be at risk for lower academic performance and lower retention rates than students with declared majors. First-year seminars and learning communities are two interventions the retention literature suggests can enhance the success of at-risk students. This paper summarizes the development, implementation, and preliminary assessment of an intervention directed toward undecided first-time-in-college (FTIC) students at University of North Texas. The intervention consists of enrollment in a first-year seminar or in a first-year seminar which is part of a learning community. The paper has three sections. The first section briefly summarizes the literature on undecided students, first-year seminars, and learning communities. The second section outlines the intervention including development of the seminar and the course pairings. The paper concludes with a summary of the success outcomes—GPA, percentage in good academic standing, and retention to the subsequent academic semester—for the students involved in the two interventions and a comparison group of undecided students. Preliminary data suggest better outcomes for students participating in the interventions than in the control group, but the study raises important questions about further research. The third section also includes recommendations for research and practice.
Dale R. Tampke is Dean of Undergraduate Studies and a Research Associate Professor-Counseling and Higher Education at University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
Raifu Durodoye is currently a Ph.D. student at the Center for Public Administration & Policy at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA
Juggling and the Art of the Integrative Assignment
Get PDFWhen faculty study samples of student work, assignment prompts typically become part of the review. Two experienced learning community faculty from Skagit Valley College examined their students’ work with three questions in mind: whether the work was grounded in disciplinary insights; whether the work leveraged disciplinary knowledge to develop new understanding; and, whether the work was purposefully and critically aware. The analysis that emerged reaffirmed the complex nature of integration: disciplinary knowledge needs to be used, not possessed, and students need to first learn the fundamentals of integration followed by lots and lots of practice. These insights led the teaching team to make simple shifts in emphasis in assignment design and classroom practices that are described in the article. The original integrative assignment for their Philosophy of Religion and Introduction to Film learning community, Sacred Space/Sacred Time/Silver Screen, is included, along with the newly tweaked assignment and students’ self-reflections on the intellectual challenges associated with integrating two disciplines
Micro-strategies: Small Steps Toward Improved Retention
Get PDFLearning communities provide an excellent venue for the practice of micro-strategies, intentional efforts aimed at making a difference for a small number of students. Building micro-strategies into the structure of learning communities can help an institution attain a valuable uptick in retention. Equally important, a shared focus on the use of micro-strategies in learning communities creates a generative framework for discussing teaching and learning among faculty and staff. A representative list of micro-strategies is provided along with likely results
Why Hyperbonding Occurs in the Learning Community Classroom and What To Do About It
Get PDFHyperbonding can be a disruptive force in the learning community classroom characterized by non-productive student behaviors. Research has not identified how frequently hyperbonding occurs in learning communities or why. However, studies have begun to link hyperbonding to the presence of cohorts. I explain how cohorts form and develop, and how they may impact instructors teaching in learning community classrooms. I then discuss the ways instructor influence strategies coupled with a cohort presence may help to precipitate hyperbonding. Last, I turn to existing cohort literature in teacher education to identify what I believe are the most cogent recommendations to help prevent hyperbonding, which learning community instructors and directors can use to help manage and support their cohorts across learning community classes and programs.
Julie Watts is an Associate Professor of Technical and Professional Communication and an Associate Dean in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Stout in Menomonie, WI
Assessing Student Work to Support Curriculum Development: An Engineering Case Study
Get PDFKnowledge and abilities associated with interdisciplinary education include integrating knowledge across disciplines, applying knowledge to real-world situations, and demonstrating skills in creativity, teamwork, communication, and collaboration. This case study discusses how a departmental curriculum committee in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University adapted the collaborative assessment protocol used in Washington Center’s national project on Assessing Learning in Learning Communities to meet curriculum committee goals. These goals included developing a strategy for examining engineering students’ interdisciplinary understanding across the curriculum and for ensuring that assessment efforts would support program improvements designed to give engineering graduates the specialized knowledge and abilities named by the National Academy of Engineering. As a means to help students achieve critical learning outcomes by aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the curriculum committee undertook a comprehensive review of student work at different levels by posing the question, “what suggestions might we offer to this student to deepen or develop the work?
Doing LCRP: The First Year
Get PDFThis editorial provides a review of the first year of Learning Communities Research and Practice and the journal\u27s potential to reconfigure our collective work