How Should Institutions of Higher Education Define and Measure Student Success? Student Success as Liberal Education Escapes Definition and Measurement

[First paragraph] The question structuring this chapter begins with the presumption that we should define and measure student success. The perspective missing from this question is: What possibilities exist for versions of student success in excess of its definition and measurement? Measurements ask us to standardize definitions of success—say, four-year graduation—and work to produce all students in this image. As a former academic adviser, I can read a university catalog and tell you the quickest pathways to graduation a university has to offer. This makes me an asset to institutions that place a value on student success as measured by graduation rates, but does shuttling students to majors with comparatively lax degree requirements produce an expansive version of student success? I am the last person to argue that metrics of student success such as college graduation lack all meaning. However, when measurements of achievements like college graduation become the focus of student affairs practice, they warp our institutions and our students in their image.1 I use graduation here as it is the most frequently cited definition of student success today, but this logic follows no matter what definition you substitute in its place. In what follows, I argue that definitions and measurements of student success construct student realities in ways that are counterproductive to liberal education, and liberal education is the ineffable outcome of higher education that produces students capable of changing the structures of our profoundly problematic world

Koinonia

The Epistemological Development of College Students, Marcia B. Baxter Magolda President\u27s Corner, The Editor\u27s Disk CoCCA: Marketing Your Student Leadership Experience & Hot Ideas Making Your Own RA Manual Great Lakes Regional Conferencehttps://pillars.taylor.edu/acsd_koinonia/1040/thumbnail.jp

Engaged Learning: Enabling Self-Authorship and Effective Practice

There is now broad consensus that higher education must extend beyond content-based knowledge to encompass intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning. The college learning outcomes needed for success in 21st century life include critical thinking, a coherent sense of self, intercultural maturity, civic engagement, and the capacity for mutual relationships. Yet, research suggests that college students are struggling to achieve these outcomes in part because skills needed to succeed in college are not those needed to succeed upon graduation. One reason for this gap is that these college learning outcomes require complex developmental capacities or “self-authorship” that higher education is not currently designed to promote

Good practices for student learning: Mixed-method evidence from the Wabash National Study

Kathleen M. Goodman, Marcia Baxter Magolda, Tricia A. Seifert, and Patricia M. King review both quantitative and qualitative data to understand students' college experiences and provide powerful information to guide educators.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/83756/1/20048_ftp.pd

“Making a difference” – Medical students’ opportunities for transformational change in health care and learning through quality improvement projects

Background Quality improvement is increasingly becoming an essential aspect of the medical curriculum, with the intention of improving the health care system to provide better health care. The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate medical students’ experiences of their involvement in quality improvement projects during a district health rotation. Methods Student group reports from rotations in learning centres of the University of Pretoria in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa were analysed for the period 2012 to 2015. Interviews were conducted with health care providers at four learning centres in 2013. Results Three main themes were identified: (1) ‘Situated learning’, describing students’ exposure to the discrepancies between ideal and reality in a real-life situation and how they learned to deal with complex situations, individually and as student group; (2) ‘Facing dilemmas’, describing how students were challenged about the non-ideal reality; (3) ‘Making a difference’, describing the impact of the students’ projects, with greater understanding of themselves and others through working in teams but also making a change in the health care system. Conclusion Quality improvement projects can provide an opportunity for both the transformation of health care and for transformative learning, with individual and ‘collective’ self-authorship

Developing graduate attributes through participation in undergraduate research conferences

© 2016 Taylor & Francis. Abstract: Graduate attributes are a framework of skills, attitudes, values and knowledge that graduates should develop by the end of their degree programmes. Adopting a largely qualitative approach and using semi-structured interviews, this paper outlines students’ experiences at a national undergraduate research conference over three years and evidences the graduate attributes developed. The students demonstrated intellectual autonomy, repurposing their work for presentation to a multidisciplinary audience through conversation with and benchmarking against peers. They gained confidence in expressing their identity as researchers and moved towards self-authorship, consciously balancing the contextual nature of their disciplinary knowledge with intra-personally grounded goals and values

Student experiences and perceptions of compulsory research projects: a veterinary perspective

Background Although research underpins clinical work, many students training to be clinicians are not inherently interested in developing research skills. Aim To characterise and understand veterinary student experiences and perceptions of compulsory research projects. Methods This was an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study, with a questionnaire survey of an entire cohort informing purposive selection for focus group discussions. Student views were triangulated with staff questionnaire data. Results About a third of the cohort felt that the project had not been worthwhile or had not fostered useful skills. Focus group data analysis identified fragility of motivation and lack of clear schemata for the research process as key themes. Students were easily demotivated by typical research challenges and lack of schemata contributed to a poor understanding of the rationale for the project, encouraging highly extrinsic forms of motivation. Triangulation with staff questionnaire data indicated that staff understood students’ challenges, but were more likely than students to consider it to be a valuable learning experience. Conclusions Findings support ongoing curriculum development and emphasise that, to optimise motivation, engagement and learning, students training to be clinicians need a clear rationale for research, based on development of critical inquiry skills as a core clinical competency

Information Literacy and its relationship to cognitive development and reflective judgment

This chapter maps the Association of College and Research Libraries\u27 Information Competency Standards for Higher Education to the cognitive development levels developed by William G. Perry and Patricia King and Karen Kitchener to suggest which competencies are appropriate for which level of cognitive development

Graduate attributes: implications for higher education practice and policy: Introduction

The higher education landscape is shifting under neo-liberal forces that are increasingly aligning the goals of business, government and education. This shift is engendering debate around the world about the role of higher education institutions in producing employable graduates to feed national prosperity in the emerging knowledge economy. As this evolution continues, we need to consider how we enhance generic graduate capabilities as well as the disciplinary expertise of our undergraduate students. Our graduates should possess the knowledge, skills and values to enable them to cope with dynamic employment opportunities, but they must also understand, through the benefits and constraints of their disciplinary perspectives, who they are and how they might contribute positively to the heterogeneity they will encounter in their local, regional and global communities