Evaluation of a Living-Learning Community For Freshmen Engineering Students
Abstract
The idea of learning communities is not new or novel, however, its role in retaining, engaging, and intellectual development for engineering students has yet to be fully explored.
There are numerous learning community studies that quantitatively measure grades and retention, and more recently studies that include engagement as measured through individual and national survey instruments. However, the vast majority of these studies are directed at general freshmen populations and not at engineering students specifically. Additionally, drawing direct causality from the learning community to the outcomes is still problematic. Controlling all the other variables that can affect grades, retention, and engagement from an experimental standpoint in an academic setting is difficult at best; consequently, a more effective methodology for evaluating a learning community program may be examining several pieces of evidence that “point” in a particular direction. This evaluative study considers a body of evidence collectively - similar to vector math – by adding the magnitude and direction of each piece of evidence to determine a relative measure of success for the program with respect to the program goals.
About Publication
Journal
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, Portland, OR. 2005
Authors
Light, J., D. Davis, G. Crouch, and J. Beller