Digest No. 06 – June 2019 – CIC Digest of Recent Research

Digest No. 06 - June 2019

Invisible Colleges, Four Decades Down the Road

The purpose of this study was to examine empirically small private colleges with limited resources. The authors grounded their study in Astin and Lee’s (1972) report, The Invisible Colleges: A Profile of Small, Private Colleges with Limited Resources, and in Clark Kerr’s designation of these colleges as those with smaller enrollments, less selective admissions policies, lower national recognition, and often threatened by closure.

Motivating Faculty Participation in Transformational Communities

Higher education scholars and administrators have found moving communities from transaction to transformation a perennial challenge. Extrapolating findings from STEM faculty members to consider transformative change in higher education more broadly, this article provides welcome information on the ways higher education stakeholders can motivate faculty to participate in “communities that create and foster innovative spaces that envision and embody a new paradigm of practice” (p. 833). The authors used a multi-phase mixed-method design including observations, interviews, document analyses, and survey techniques to examine practice communities comprised of thousands of faculty members. The article articulates five criteria for inclusion, shared by each community: “(a) STEM education and reform as focus, (b) large in scale and leading to dissemination of best practices, (c) focused STEM reform within the context of postsecondary education, (d) long enough history so we could study not just formation but also outcomes and sustainability; and (e) the ability to survey community members” (p. 839). Examining these communities enabled the authors to identify ways administrators could motivate faculty members to participate in transformation efforts, many of which were initiated by college presidents.

How Culture Shapes Faculty Members’ Experiences—for Good or Ill—at Liberal Arts Colleges

“We have a lot of dysfunctional departments, because the administration allows them to be so. I’ve been chair for six years. Ever since I got tenure. There are no tools that I’m given; no training on how to deal with conflict or how to make it a better place. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and we’re still dysfunctional. It’s taken a toll on me and not been made any better. But there’s absolutely zero support from the administration in trying to create a decent working environment at the departmental level, and there’s no way for us to punish or reward people who behave poorly or well. God, I desperately want out, but I don’t see any way. There’s no one else to do it.” (p. 554)

Will Student Bystanders Intervene? Testing an Intention-Assessment Instrument

The purpose of this study was to introduce and test an instrument designed to assess students’ intention to intervene in bystander situations related to sexual and partner violence. The authors grounded the development of their instrument in the social-ecological model of violence, developed by Dahlberg and Krug (2002), and Latané and Darley’s (1970) decision model of helping. By combining environmental and contextual considerations with cognitive processes, the scenario-based instrument is intended to fill a gap in current measures of bystander intervention by college students. The instrument uses multiple scenarios and possible behavioral responses to measure students’ intention to intervene along the continuum of sexual and partner violence while also considering multiple perspectives and relationships to those involved.

What Is the Impact of “High Impact” on College Students’ Early Careers?

This study used the most recent nationally representative data set tracking college students into the workforce and provided new empirical evidence on the influence of several “high-impact” experiences (see Association of American Colleges & Universities 2007) on the early career outcomes of recent college graduates. Specifically, the authors examined the influence of five high-impact practices (undergraduate research, diversity/global learning opportunities, service and community-based learning, internships, and culminating senior capstone courses) on four early-career outcomes: earnings, job satisfaction, sense of commitment to one’s job, and continued learning and challenge in one’s place of employment.

Student Loans and College Graduation

The purpose of this study was to offer advice concerning the relationship between educational loans and graduation rates and how this relationship varies based on race and ethnicity. The authors appropriately used discrete-time survival analytic techniques to determine the borrowing patterns of 3,445 individuals across 15 survey administrations. Limited by their secondary data source (the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth), the authors were unable to pinpoint the type of loan (subsidized, unsubsidized, state, federal, or private) and its relationship to graduation rates, but they were able to identify the amount borrowed that seemed to tip the scales in favor of not completing college. In short, educational loans shared a positive relationship with graduation rates, but only up to a point: $19,753. Beyond that figure, the relationship between educational loans and graduation rates began to weaken for everyone, including students who identified as black or, in the authors’ language, “Hispanic” (p. 993).

Developing Undergraduates’ Innovation Capacities and Curricular Interventions

College campuses nationwide are striving to develop innovators, as the skills and abilities generally associated with innovation (such as creativity, teamwork across difference, and persuasive communication) are in increasingly high demand among both students and employers. Yet, few studies to date have sought to investigate the effects of curricular interventions specifically designed to promote such capacities (namely, beliefs about self, social skills, and cognitive abilities theoretically associated with being an innovator). Using an instrument detailed in the October 2018 issue of the Digest of Recent Research, “Measuring Students’ Capacities for Innovation” (No. 5), this study investigated undergraduates’ development of innovation capacities by employing a pre-test/post-test design across three course conditions at one institution.

Gamifying Gender Bias Recognition and Reporting

Under the premise that gender bias is ubiquitous within the academy, the authors developed an experiment to examine the effectiveness of an intervention designed to enable participants to recognize and report gender bias in promotion and tenure decisions. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the first condition, participants experienced the intervention, the Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation in the Academy (WAGES-Academic; Shields et al. 2011), a “gamelike simulation of subtle sexism in the academic workplace” (p. 618). In the second condition, participants received information on gender equity in the workplace but did not participate in the simulation. In the third condition, participants played a modified version of Chutes and Ladders. This part of the experimental design was intended to “be similar to WAGES in terms of engagement and the active-learning format but without information about subtle sexism” (p. 619). The study took place in two phases in order to assess the two outcomes: recognizing and reporting gender bias. Results from the study indicated that WAGES participants were statistically more likely to recognize and report gender bias.