Doherty, Anne

McDonough, Beth A.

Perry, April

English

Purdue E-Pubs

Against the Grain Volume 30 Issue 1 Article 17 2018 Collecting to the Core — Best Practices in College Student Development Beth A. McDonough Western Carolina University, bmcdono@wcu.edu Anne Doherty CHOICE/ACRL, adoherty@ala-choice.org April Perry Western Carolina University, alperry@wcu.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg  Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation McDonough, Beth A.; Doherty, Anne; and Perry, April (2018) "Collecting to the Core — Best Practices in College Student Development," Against the Grain: Vol. 30: Iss. 1, Article 17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.8006 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu for additional information. 42 Against the Grain / February 2018 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>continued on page 43Collecting to the Core — Best Practices in College Student Developmentby Dr. Beth A. McDonough  (Research and Instruction Librarian, Associate Professor, Hunter Library, Western Carolina University;  Education Subject Editor, Resources for College Libraries: Career Resources)  <bmcdono@wcu.edu>and Dr. April Perry  (Assistant Professor and Program Director, Higher Education Student Affairs, Western Carolina University)  <alperry@wcu.edu>Column Editor:  Anne Doherty  (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL)  <adoherty@ala-choice.org>Column Editor’s Note:  The “Collecting to the Core” column highlights monographic works that are essential to the academic li-brary within a particular discipline, inspired by the Resources for College Libraries bib-liography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). In each essay, subject specialists introduce and explain the classic titles and topics that continue to remain relevant to the undergrad-uate curriculum and library collection.  Dis-ciplinary trends may shift, but some classics never go out of style. — ADMost undergraduate students arrive at college as adolescents and leave as young adults.  They come from increasingly diverse socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and gender backgrounds, which creates more and more complex campus environments.  While the undergraduate experience can no longer be considered a singular phenomenon, if that was ever the case, a growing body of evidence supports the relationship between healthy student development and academic success. The expectation remains that students be transformed by the college experience and college student development research and theory is key to creating conditions for that transformation.  As the core works discussed in this essay demonstrate, understanding college student development is at the heart of current best practices in higher education, making these monographs valuable additions to any undergraduate library collection.  Every librarian has experienced the patron who knows exactly which book he or she wants, but can’t remember the title: “You know, the green book.”  Student Services: A Handbook for the Profession is such a book for generations of student affairs professionals who do indeed know it as “the green book.”1 Authored by scholars and practitioners, this “big picture” handbook is updated every few years and offers essential theoretical bases, organizational frameworks, historical con-text, and professional competencies for the student affairs profession.  The sixth edition published in 2017 contains several new chap-ters, including one focused on college student development. Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Teren-zini’s groundbreaking book, How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research, synthesizes more than 2,600 studies in order to understand the impact of college on students.2  Together with the second volume,  How College Affects Stu-dents: A Third Decade of Research, more than 30 years of research findings are considered.3 Most recently, How College Affects Students: 21st Century Evidence that Higher Education Works, continues this work by incorporating research from 2002-2013 in a third volume.4 Each volume updates evidence and compares current findings to past research. A more specialized work, Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice, deeply explores the range of college student development theory.5  The third edition of this classic text has been expanded and revised and includes new insights into emerging identity theory, including faith and gender identities.  While past editions were organized chronologically, the new edition utilizes a conceptual organi-zational structure, which makes a dense body of theory more accessible to students, faculty, and practitioners.The two leading student affairs professional organizations, American College Personnel Association-College Student Educators In-ternational (commonly known as ACPA) and Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education (commonly known as NASPA), collaborated to publish two influential reports intended to redefine student affairs practice and its relationship to student learning.  Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-wide Focus on the Student Experience challenged educators to view “learning and development as inter-twined, inseparable elements of the student experience.”6  To that end, the report outlined seven transformative learning outcomes related to college student development, dimensions of those outcomes, sample developmental expe-riences, and theories for educators.  Published shortly thereafter, Learning Reconsidered 2: A Practical Guide to Implementing a Cam-pus-wide Focus on the Student Experience billed itself as a “blueprint for action” offering the “dialogue, tools, and materials necessary to put into practice the recommendations in Learning Reconsidered.”7  The fact that a half-dozen professional organizations in higher education joined ACPA and NASPA in sponsoring the second report is testimony to the unified vision embraced by the higher education student affairs community. George Kuh, the researcher who founded the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and developed High Im-pact Educational Practices (HIPs), has made many significant contributions to the literature on college student success.  Two titles for un-dergraduate academic libraries to consider are the game-changing volume Student Success in College: Creating Conditions that Matter and the more recent Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Ed-ucation.8-9  The former emerged from a two-year study of twenty institutions’ student success initia-tives originating from the NSSE and dubbed Project DEEP (Doc-umenting Effective Educational Practice).  The revised edition revisits the same schools five years later to update the evidence of impact on students.  Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education is grounded in research conducted at the National Institute for Learning Out-comes Assessment (NILOA).  Authored by NILOA’s principal scholars, chapters advocate using student learning outcome assessment to improve student success, rather than mere compliance to accreditation standards.  They examine broader relationships between out-comes assessment, academic achievement, and institutional effectiveness.Frances Stage and Kathleen Manning’s popular handbook, Research in the College Context: Approaches and Methods, was re-vised and updated in 2016.10  Reflecting cur-rent trends, the authors added chapters about mixed-methods research and participatory action research; expanded information about equity and justice, critical research approach-es, and visual research methods; and updated methods for disseminating research results with special attention devoted to online media. The book offers practical, real-world examples of diverse approaches to researching college students and campus settings.  Charles Carney Strange and James Banning’s Designing for Learning: Creating Campus Environments for Student Success is a revised and expanded edition of their earlier influential work Educating by Design: Creating Campus Environments for Student Success.11  The authors examine how the design components of campus environments impact their learning purposes and present strategies and a practical framework that can be used to evaluate collegiate physical spaces with the intention of improving student success. 43Against the Grain / February 2018 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>   With higher education outcomes under in-creased scrutiny from the public and politicians alike, this core collection of evidence-based texts is of value to any college or university and should not be overlooked by institutions simply because they do not support a student affairs program.  The research about what helps college students develop and succeed is of in-terest to administrators, faculty, librarians, and even curious students.  Indeed, today’s higher education practitioners have unprecedented ac-cess to information about best practices and an open invitation to contribute to transformative student experiences.  Collecting to the Corefrom page 42Endnotes1.  Schuh, John H., Susan R. Jones, and Vasti Torres.  Student Services: A Handbook for the Profession.  6th ed.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.*2.  Pascarella, Ernest T., and Patrick T. Terenzini.  How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.*3.  Pascarella, Ernest T., and Patrick T. Terenzini.  How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.*4.  Mayhew, Matthew J., Alyssa N. Rock-enbach, Nicholas A. Bowman, Tricia A. Seifert, and Gregory C. Wolniak with Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Teren-zini.  How College Affects Students: 21st Century Evidence that Higher Education Works.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.5.  Patton, Lori D., Kristin A. Renn, Flor-ence Guido-DiBrito, and Stephen John Quaye.  Student Development in College: Theory, Research, and Practice.  3rd ed.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.*6.  Keeling, Richard P., ed.  Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-wide Focus on the Student Experience.  ACPA, NASPA: Washington, D.C., 2004. 7.  Keeling, Richard P., ed.  Learning Reconsidered 2: A Practical Guide to Implementing a Campus-wide Focus on the Student Experience.  ACPA, NASPA: Washington, D.C., 2006. 8.  Kuh, George D., Jillian Kinzie, John H. Schuh, and Elizabeth J. Whitt.  Student Success in College: Creating Conditions that Matter.  Rev. ed.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.*9.  Kuh, George D., Stanley O. Ikenberry, Natasha A. Jankowski, Timothy Reese Cain, Peter T. Ewell, Pat Hutchings, and Jillian Kinzie.  Using Evidence of Student Learning to Improve Higher Education.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015.*10.  Stage, Frances K., and Kathleen Manning.  Research in the College Context: Approaches and Methods.  2nd ed.  New York: Routledge, 2016. 11.  Strange, Charles Carney, and James H. Banning.  Designing for Learning: Creating Campus Environments for Student Success.  2nd ed.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2015.**Editor’s note: An asterisk (*) denotes a title selected for Resources for College Libraries.Booklover — Japanese ArtColumn Editor:  Donna Jacobs  (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC  29425)  <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in literature.  Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” was already somewhat familiar to the American reader.  His 1989 novel Remains of the Day was transformed into the 1993 movie by the same name starring Anthony Hopkins.Prior to choosing a novel to delve into, I read the press around this announcement.  An opinion piece by Garrison Keillor provided a curious perspective in typical Keillor humor: “Once again the humorless Swedes have cho-sen a writer of migraines for the Nobel Prize in literature, an author of twilight meditations on time and memory and mortality and cold toast by loners looking at bad wallpaper.” ….“Of course all the book critics applauded the choice of Kazuo Ishiguro:  Praising the dull and deadly is a time-tested way to demonstrate intellectual superiority.  It’s like taking a ski vacation in North Dakota:  It sets you apart from the crowd.  And comedy is so utterly adolescent.”Well, this set up my reading adventure quite differently, off to the library to check out An Artist of the Floating World.Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan.  His family moved to the United Kingdom when he was a young boy. He graduated in En-glish and Philosophy at the University of Kent, and continued with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.  Once I learned of his biography, I found the title of the novel I chose intriguing and somewhat reflective of this author/artist.  It is written in English about an artist who made some creative decisions during World War II that set the course for his professional career.  The cadence of the writing settles you into the Japanese cul-tural experience.  I floated pleasantly between subtleties of Japanese culture, conversational innuendo and post war angst;  and the English language by which all this was delivered.Masuji Ono, the story’s central figure, be-gins his career in the art of ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”).  The definition being given as “an art closely connected with the pleasures of theatres, restaurants, teahouses, geisha and courtesans in the even then very large city.”  Ono struggles reflectively with his career choice to pursue a more pragmatic path with his artistic talent.  He expresses his difficult decision to Mori-san, his Sensei:  “I have learnt many things over these past years. I have learnt much in contemplating the world of pleasure, and recognizing its fragile beauty. But I now feel it is time for me to progress to other things.  Sensei, it is my belief that in such troubled times as these, artists must learn to value something more tangible than those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light.  It is not necessary that artists always occupy a decadent and enclosed world. My conscience, Sen-sei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.”  Rumorsfrom page 38approaches to public service and are making a difference for individuals, families and com-munities.  The SC Aquarium was nominated for the National Medal by Robert Macdon-ald, Director Emeritus of the Museum of the City of New York and Director Emeritus of the South Carolina Aquarium board of directors. Macdonald’s unique perspective on museums and the critical role they play in the economic health and cultural fabric of the community was instrumental in helping shape the Aquarium’s identity as a community gathering place, con-vener, and valuable resource in South Carolina. The Charleston Conference is proud to allow Charleston Conference accompanying family members to attend the Gala Reception! A parting Rumor just received — Dig-ital Science and Katalysis are pleased to announce the launch of a pilot project to test blockchain technologies to support the peer review process.  They are joined in this pilot project by founding partner Springer Nature. The initiative is an important step towards a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for peer review and explores the utility of decentralized data stores in supporting trusted assertions that connect researchers to their activities.  As research volumes increase each year, the prob-lems of research reproducibility, recognition of reviewers and the rising burden of the review process, have led to a challenging landscape for scholarly communications.  In its initial phase, this initiative aims to look at practical solutions that leverage the distributed registry and smart contract elements of blockchain technologies. Later phases aim to establish a consortium of organisations committed to working together to solve scholarly communications challeng-es that center around peer review.  Digital Science will manage the project and looks forward to coordinating with further partners continued on page 54

Collecting to the Core — Best Practices in College Student Development

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