LiberalArtsOnline Volume 4, Number 2
January 2004
Last fall we offered our first digest of research we have sponsored, in an essay titled, "If It’s Hard to Get In, It Must Be Good?" It elicited some strong reactions, both for and against. We hope that readers who felt provoked went on to read the underlying research study. In this issue of LiberalArtsOnline we present a second digest, by our managing editor, of sponsored research. When you have read his essay, we hope you will also take a look at the full research report (pdf). As always we look forward to receiving your comments. We would like to know your view, for example, on how well these reports serve our mission of strengthening liberal arts education.
--The Editors
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"Looking for Good Practices? Look First at Liberal Arts Colleges"
by Frederik Ohles
Senior Research Fellow
Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN.
What determines a college's impact on student learning and development? Selectivity in admissions? That is what public opinion, those ever-popular rankings, and the publicity pieces that elite colleges send out would have you believe. Higher education researchers have suspected for some time, though, that the correct answer is more complicated and more profound than that. Liberal arts colleges, from the most selective of them to the least, have claimed all along that their very nature enhances the environment for student learning. It sounds good, but where is the evidence to support that claim? Research sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts has now found it.
A dozen years ago, Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini wrote that "selectivity may have a latent impact… activated only when embedded in a supportive social-psychological context." That kind of context would take shape, according to Pascarella and Terenzini, when professors showed that they cared about their teaching and about their students’ development, when people all across campus valued the life of the mind, when the small size of an institution helped its members to have a shared intellectual experience, when students and faculty interacted frequently inside and outside of the classroom, and when there was a wealth of interactions on campus among students too. Such exceptional institutional traits seemed to be found most often at small, selective liberal arts colleges.
In fact, there was already some evidence supporting this idea. That evidence came from "cross-sectional" studies that compared different institutional types. Students and alumni of liberal arts colleges reported a significantly different undergraduate experience than students and alumni of other institutions. The difference included higher academic and social effort, more intense learning experiences, and more extracurricular involvement.
The cross-sectional evidence did not make clear, though, the extent to which liberal arts colleges actually had made the difference. It was possible that liberal arts colleges simply attracted and enrolled students who were more inclined to high involvement, and more open to being changed by their education.
To tease out the separate effects on student experiences caused by the admission process on the one hand, and by the campus context on the other hand, Pascarella and two of his graduate students, Ty M. Cruce and Gregory C. Wolniak, in partnership with Charles F. Blaich, Director of Inquiries at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, used a longitudinal study. Their research found that attending a liberal arts college does have a positive effect on the quality of the undergraduate experience.
The research team studied a randomly selected group of 2,000 students who enrolled for the first time in the fall of 1992 at 16 colleges and universities in 13 states. The 16 schools included liberal arts colleges, public and private research universities, and comprehensive regional institutions. The group under study was very similar to the national population of four-year college undergraduates by ethnicity, gender, and age. Admissions standards varied widely among the 16 institutions, from most selective to wide open. The five private liberal arts colleges in the study also varied widely in their selectivity. The median enrollment at those liberal arts colleges was 1,700.
To guard against giving the colleges credit for what students had going for them before they ever enrolled, the researchers looked carefully at the personal qualities and values that students brought with them to college, in addition to their experiences in college. Pre-college data included detailed student demographic information such as household income, reading habits, parents’ education, and high school activities, as well as the students’ college expectations and their career aspirations. In each year of the study, each participant completed the reading comprehension, mathematics, and critical thinking tests of the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP), as well as the College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ), and a specially designed follow-up questionnaire with extensive information about classroom and non-classroom experiences. The study continued in the second year of college with 1,300 of the students, and in the third year with 900 of them. As the group became smaller, its background characteristics remained essentially unchanged. The full research report is available on the web site of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
Pascarella and his research partners grouped a total of 19 good practices into seven categories:
Student-faculty contact--quality of non-classroom interactions; faculty interest in teaching and student development
Cooperation among students--faculty emphasis on cooperative learning; course-related interactions
Active learning and time on task--academic effort and involvement; essay examinations; faculty using higher-order questioning techniques; emphasis on higher order examination questions; computer use
Prompt feedback--worked returned quickly with comments
High expectations--course challenge and effort; scholarly and intellectual emphasis; number of textbooks and amount of assigned reading; number of term papers and written reports
Quality of teaching--instructional skill and clarity; organization and preparation
Influential interactions with other students--quality of interactions; interactions not related to courses; cultural and interpersonal involvement
Since the path-breaking work of Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson two decades ago, a broad consensus has emerged, supported by extensive research, that these topical areas encompass good practice.
In their first year, students at liberal arts colleges scored their institutions significantly higher than students at both national research universities and regional comprehensive institutions on 12 of 19 measures of good practice. The advantages spanned student-faculty contact, cooperative learning, prompt feedback, effective teaching, three out of five measures on active learning, and three out of four measures on high expectations. In the second year, the gap in favor of liberal arts college students continued to widen. They reported higher scores on nine of the 19 good practices compared with students at research universities, and on four of 19 compared with students at comprehensive regional institutions. Additional effects in the third year were much smaller. Though the accumulation of differences tailed off by the third year, no passage of time took away from liberal arts college students that sizeable advantage due to good practices that they had gotten in the first year, and that their professors reinforced in the following years.
The study suggests strongly that liberal arts colleges have a significant edge in fostering good practices in undergraduate education. The positive link between studying at a liberal arts college and experiencing good practices cannot be explained away by differences in student background. The link does not depend on how selective a liberal arts college is in its admissions, nor on whether students live on campus, nor even whether they attend full-time or part-time.
The liberal arts colleges in the study did enroll more students whose parents had been to college, more students with extensive extracurricular records, and more students with strong social networks in high school. The research design, however, controlled for these confounding advantages and many more like them, before measuring differences in good practices. The finding of a liberal arts college advantage in good practices comes, then, from a well-designed study. With careful control for pre-college factors, it followed a randomly-selected, representative group of students enrolled at different kinds of institutions through their first three undergraduate years.
Liberal arts colleges seem to do several things simultaneously that allow them to maximize good practices. In an educational community with 1,500 or 2,000 students, compared with 23,000 (the median of the research universities in this study) or 12,500 (the median of the comprehensive regional institutions), the more manageable scale invites much broader participation by proportionately more students. Pascarella and his fellow researchers point to the recent efforts of large universities to develop learning communities and living-learning centers, in the hope of replicating the advantages of close attention and cooperation that are hallmarks of liberal arts colleges.
Liberal arts colleges appear to have an ethos that embeds and sustains good practices throughout their programs. Given the results of this study, there is merit to looking further, in as much detail as possible, at the kinds of institutional practices and principles that provide coherent, supportive contexts for teaching and learning, and that support decisions to hire faculty who are already adept at good practices or are willing and able to learn them.
The differences in good practices between liberal arts colleges and other institutions are most pronounced during the first year in college. With each further year, the additional benefit of a liberal arts college on students’ experience of good practices becomes progressively smaller. That trend is consistent, Pascarella, Cruce, Wolniak, and Blaich observe, with a widely held view, that the most powerful enhancements of education in a liberal arts college come from the socialization into being a student that takes place during the first year. That is when, after all, students first face an education that should be very different from what they have experienced in high school.
The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts is committed to undertaking further, carefully constructed studies that examine over time the conditions and outcomes of a liberal arts education. We believe that the findings from studies of this kind offer important lessons for all institutions--whether large or small, public or private, focused principally on development of the intellectual arts or on job-related training--about positive steps that all of us can take to enhance the quality of education available to our students.
Direct personal responses to lao@wabash.edu.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.