Deborah Grossman-Garber felt isolated and alone.
As Director of the Office of Student Learning at the University of Rhode Island, her job was to improve the experiences of undergraduate students using assessment data. But she kept running into roadblocks, finding little support from faculty and administrators.
“We had rooms full of expensive survey data on our students, but I had almost nothing specific to the student experience,” she recalls. “It was as if we were afraid of what the data might tell us.”
Professors didn’t have time to study and fully understand the reams of data, and administrators and faculty alike were reluctant to discuss potential weaknesses in the curriculum and classroom experience.
That’s when Charlie Blaich and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts (CILA) stepped in and introduced the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education.
Rhode Island was among the first university to participate in the Wabash National Study, a longitudinal study to investigate critical factors that affect the outcomes of liberal arts education. But unlike many similar surveys, the Wabash Study was designed to help more than 50 participating colleges and universities to improve student learning and bring about action-oriented change based on evidence.
“Charlie’s work threw a lifeline to those of us in higher education who are involved with student learning outcomes assessment and who struggle to improve the outcomes and ensure success,” says Grossman-Garber, now Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education for the State of Rhode Island. “The Center has created a national learning community of professionals, faculty, and administrators —campus leaders, who are outspoken, well-read, and well-connected on campuses. The Center has molded us into a pretty tightknit group.”
It’s a group with one goal in mind: to strengthen liberal arts education for the students.
“Over time we have found a unique way to enact the original mission of the Center of Inquiry, which was to be of benefit to students,” says Blaich, CILA’s director and professor of psychology at Wabash, where the Center is housed in the College’s Byron K. Trippet Hall. “What the Center does best is to support the change agents on campuses who want to improve liberal arts colleges using data and evidence. We facilitate the change agents within their own peculiar institutional cultures to help them provide a better education for their students.”
A “Gentlemanly Way” of Building Trust
The success of the Center of Inquiry has been hard earned.Blaich and his team of researchers had to get a handle on national issues, which meant travel to conferences near and far while simultaneously developing a keen yet flexible understanding of individual institutional cultures. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the work we’re doing,” Blaich says. “Every college has its own culture.”
The Center staff also had to convince administrators to open up the data banks and address the findings.
“If you want a sense of the success of the Center of Inquiry, look at the number of institutions involved in the National Study—that alone should turn heads,” says Jillian Kinzie, who directs the NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) Institute at Indiana University. “Institu-tions are going into this work knowing that it will be difficult, they’ll find out things they don’t want to know, and then they’re going to have to do something about it.
“[Administrators] realized quickly that if you participate in this, your work will be respected, the Center staff will work with you, you will not be exposed, and you can trust them. They have garnered people’s trust, and that’s both remarkable and important.”
Building that trust was critical. Center staff kept a low profile and chose not to shine a bright light on themselves, Wabash College, or even the Center of Inquiry. They approached the work as scholars from the same side of the desk, and they applied the values inherent in each institution to the work that would be done.
Vice President at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems Peter Ewell consults with scores of institutions seeking reaccreditation and is well versed in virtually every national survey or study. He says the trust that institutions place in the Center is a direct reflection of Wabash College values: “I think it’s the hallmark of the Center’s work to do this—in the Wabash context—in a gentlemanly way. The Center’s work is done with the real and true values of the liberal arts personally embodied in Charlie and the Center—as the most important thing. So much of what we do in assessment is around workforce, meeting social demands, access and mobility, and the values part of this gets lost. And the Center’s work keeps the values of the liberal arts front and center.”
The Center has welcomed hundreds of guests to its home on the Wabash College campus—presidents, deans, provosts, faculty members, institutional researchers, and students—to workshops designed to help them understand how to read data and develop an actionable narrative from it. Today, no visitors to the Center of Inquiry leave without a plan of action and a promise backed by their own institution’s financial support to implement it.
Michael Reder directs the Center for Teaching and Learning at Connecticut College, an early participant in the Wabash National Study. He says that working on the Wabash Study not only shaped his professional agenda but shaped the school’s agenda as a whole. “It’s made us better,” he said. “We’re making decisions based on evidence.”
An Unprecedented Study
Starting with 19 institutions in the fall of 2006, the National Study of Liberal Arts Education expanded to 26 schools the following year and 26 more joined the study in 2008. In 2010, the Center launched a second version known simply as “the Wabash Study.” What made the first National Study different was the scope of the inquiry—measuring how much time students spend studying outside of class, levels of intellectual curiosity, growth or change, moral reasoning, and openness to diversity.
Teagle Foundation President Rich Morill says the impact of the study and its measures is driving a national discussion.
“The Wabash National Study is widely seen as the ‘gold standard’ for studies that have a bearing on the wider goals
of liberal education, and it is one of the few approaches to assessment that has taken on broader aims like diversity, moral reasoning, curiosity, etc.”
And it’s benefiting students, even in those areas once thought difficult to measure. When one of the most diverse institutions in the country received Wabash National Study evidence that its students’ feelings about tolerance and diverse interactions actually plummeted during the first year of college, it developed a series of courses and programs in response.
When data showed that the critical thinking skills of students at one private liberal arts college fell sharply during
the first year, administrators blew up the orientation program and the required freshman curriculum.
Another institution with a strict adherence to an honor code discovered its first-year students showed a decline
in moral reasoning.
“The Center’s findings are important. Higher education needs a truth-ometer —accessible metrics to determine outcomes,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “Wabash College has the potential to give us a much more informed narrative of what we’re doing well and not well, and hold our feet to the fire.”
The Wabash Way
The methodical approach of Blaich and CILA Associate Director of Inquiries Kathy Wise has been trusted and well received by faculty and administrators alike. Proceeding with care and concern for institutional cultures while acknowledging the presumably slow pace of change in higher education has paid huge dividends for the work of the Center and the growth of the National Study.
“Their success is due to their humility,” says Grossman-Garber. “They allow others to own the process; they allow faculty
to own the data.”
Across the country, that process is known as the “Wabash Way.”
“The ‘Wabash Way’ is a unique methodological approach of presenting data about students’ undergraduate
experiences and engaging the academic community to interpret and make sense of the information,” says Scott Simkins, Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at North Carolina A&T State University. “This deliberative, nonprescriptive technique entices students and educators into a collaborative venture of improving student learning outcomes and the overall learning environment for our students.”
The Multiplier Effect
Blaich discovered early on that CILA simply wasn’t staffed to meet the increasing demand for the work, nor could it be. Partnering with the Teagle Foundation, CILA created Teagle Assessment Scholars, a program designed to identify, train, and develop leaders who can work independently on their own campuses. They also team with other Teagle Scholars to travel the country teaching administrators, faculty members, and students how to work with the data to bring change designed to deliver better education.
Following the lead of a pilot program at Wabash developed by Kyle Long ’07, NC A&T created a program that develops cadres of student researchers. Working with Wabash students and CILA staff, the NC A&T Wabash Provost Scholars were taught how to lead focus groups, ask questions, and conduct further research. Then the NC A&T students trained students from Connecticut College, where participants are called Wabash Student Research Scholars.
Grossman-Garber says the “multiplier effect” is stunning.
“As a Teagle Scholar, I’m asked to go out to other schools, and I’ve discovered the same issues everywhere I go,” she says. “It’s a people problem—a human problem where we don’t want to hear bad news, we don’t want to be told that we’re not meeting our goals. And then we don’t know how to dig ourselves out of the bad news. The Center at Wabash has now provided a way for us to do that.”
Embracing Data for Students
“The Study has or will do more to shape our understanding of student learning in the 21st century than any other study has to date,” says Reder. “It’s the gold standard for understanding student experiences and student learning.”
Reder says that the faculty and administration response to this cultural sea change—embracing the data to benefit the students—is going viral on his campus. Pulling metrics from the Wabash National Study, Reder devised course-specific surveys that students at Connecticut take at the end of terms. To date, nearly 60 teachers have administered surveys to more than 1,000 students, and the faculty are busy analyzing the data to determine how to improve the courses. “They want to be good teachers and they want their students to learn,” said Reder.
“It’s a wonderful study,” he continued. “The data coming out of it are driving the ways people are thinking about
allocating resources to improve learning based on evidence. Wabash is a name that is known by hundreds of schools and thousands of scholars around the country—based on the Study. Wabash wasn’t on the radar, certainly in New England, but it is today.”
Geary Schneider, who leads the nation’s largest association of liberal arts colleges and universities, puts the Center’s work into perspective: “It has taken a long time for the Center to build the infrastructure, develop the longitudinal database, and to create the interest in higher education. Now that we’ve found the data, the story is so arresting that you can’t stop telling it.
“Wabash is host to one of the most important centers in the country that knows the most about providing the most powerful form of education possible, and that should be a point of pride for the institution.”