Critical Issues in Christian Higher Education
June 20, 2003
“Making the Case for Academic Excellence in Christian Colleges”
Laurie A. Schreiner, Ph.D.
Azusa Pacific University
As we kick off our Critical Issues in Christian Higher Education conference this
year, you’ll note that we are beginning with the issue of academic excellence. This
year’s conference focuses on the evidence we have collected over the years in the
Council for Christian Colleges & Universities – evidence to support how well we are
delivering on our promises, those promises that we have articulated as our mission
statements. We have analyzed all of the CCCU members’ mission statements and
discovered that there are four primary “promises” we are making to our students: that
they will receive an excellent academic education and grow intellectually, that they will
grow spiritually and be able to develop a Christian worldview, that they will develop
leadership abilities, and that they will have the opportunity to serve. In later plenary
sessions, we will address faith formation and Christian worldview issues, service, and
leadership. This morning we begin by talking about academic excellence precisely
because it is at the heart of our mission—we are first and foremost educational
institutions, academic communities.
A study conducted in 2000 by Maguire and associates investigated the
experiences and perceptions of over 2,100 prospective students and their parents who
inquired to a CCCU institution. One of their most disturbing findings was that the more
important academic excellence was to a prospective student, the less likely he or she was
to enroll in a CCCU institution—and the earlier he or she left the admissions process to
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pursue other institutions. These students were particularly concerned about two issues:
(1) the level of academic excellence and the intellectual life on campus, and (2) the level
of open inquiry encouraged on campus versus a narrow or close-minded religiosity that
stifled intellectual inquiry and debate. Concerns about “closed-mindedness” abounded in
these students’ and their parents’ perceptions of CCCU institutions.
So today our question is this: what is the reality? What does the evidence say
about the level of academic excellence on our campuses? And is the perception of
“closed-mindedness” an accurate one? To gather answers to these questions we went to
the data we have collected over the past eight years through the Comprehensive
Assessment Project that Randy and I have co-directed for the CCCU. I looked at four
major pieces of data: the 2002 CIRP survey of almost 13,000 first-year students in the
CCCU (conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute), the 2002 College
Student Survey of over 6,000 graduating seniors in the CCCU, the 2001 Student
Satisfaction Inventory results from about 20,000 undergraduates across the CCCU, and
data from the 2000 National Survey of Student Engagement, in which 16 CCCU
institutions provided data from their first-year students and their seniors. For a fun
comparison of perceptions, I also included data from over 3,100 CCCU faculty collected
in 1998. In most cases, I will be comparing the CCCU results to national norms for
private, non-religious colleges and universities.
To frame the academic excellence question, I used Sandy Astin’s InputsExperiences-Outputs model. “Inputs” refers to the abilities of the students when they
enter CCCU institutions, “experiences” refers to what actually happens while they are
with us, and “outputs” refers to the reported abilities students have at graduation. The
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clearest way of indicating that we are delivering on our promise of academic excellence
is to demonstrate that students have gained significantly in their knowledge, skills, and
academic dispositions as a result of attending a CCCU institution. That’s a little difficult
to demonstrate conclusively, but we have at least begun the process.
The first question I explored was, “how well prepared for college are students
who enter CCCU institutions?” Are there significant differences in the academic
abilities of our students compared to students at other private colleges? One clear answer
to this is that our students had significantly higher grades in high school: 55.2% of CCCU
students had average high school grades of A- or better, compared to 44.6% of private
college students. However, students entering CCCU institutions were significantly less
likely to have taken an Advanced Placement course or exam (39.2% compared to 46.3%
in private colleges) and had lower degree aspirations – that is, while an impressive 62.8%
of CCCU students stated an intention to pursue graduate school at some point in their life,
that is significantly less than the 76.1% of private college students with those intentions.
So we have a paradox here – better high school grades, but lower lifetime educational
goals.
When we examine the reasons students choose a CCCU institution, we find that
the #1 reason is our religious orientation (72.2% stated that was an “important” or “very
important” reason for choosing to enroll). The number two reason is our academic
reputation: 53.1% list that as an “important” or “very important” reason for enrolling. So
how does this compare to private colleges? For private institutions, the academic
reputation of the college is their number one reason for attending: 61.9% list it as
“important” or “very important.” Financial aid and the size of the college are very distant
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“seconds” on the list. This data seems to indicate that while over half of our students
choose us for our academic reputation, we still have a long way to go—most of our
students are choosing us for a different reason.
So the “inputs” seem to be mostly positive – our students appear to have been
successful in high school and over half of them choose us because of our academic
reputation. That gives us something to work with! Now we move to the “experiences”
part of the equation and our question is, “what actually happens to these students while
they are in our classrooms—and how does that compare to the learning process on other
private college campuses?” To help frame an exploration of this data, I used Chickering
and Gamson’s (1987) Good Practices in Undergraduate Education. These are specific
practices or behaviors that have been demonstrated to have a positive effect on students’
learning. They include the following: (1) student-faculty contact, (2) cooperation among
students, (3) active learning, (4) prompt feedback, (5) time on task, (6) high expectations,
and (7) respect for diverse talents and ways of learning.
First let’s look at student-faculty interactions. According to data from the Student
Satisfaction Inventory, CCCU students are significantly more satisfied with faculty
availability outside of class and with their advisor’s approachability (p < .001). Data
from our seniors tells us that our students are significantly more likely to have been a
guest in a professor’s home (74.7% vs. 54.6%) and are slightly more satisfied with the
overall amount of contact they have with faculty (86.8% vs. 83.9%). Data from the
National Survey of Student Engagement indicates that while our first-year students’
amount of interaction with faculty is only slightly better than that at private colleges, by
the senior year there is a significant difference in student-faculty interactions when we
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compare the CCCU to other private colleges (p < .01). The NSSE measures studentfaculty interaction with behaviors such as: discussing grades and assignments, talking
about career plans, discussing ideas from class, working on research with faculty, and
working together in student clubs and on committees.
So student-faculty interaction appears to be a strength of CCCU campuses—one
that comes as no surprise to us. But there is a surprise—when we look at the type of
interaction CCCU students and faculty are having. While CCCU students are much more
likely to be a guest in a professor’s home and report significantly higher levels of
emotional support and encouragement from faculty than do students at other private
colleges, data from our graduating seniors indicates that our students actually spend
fewer hours per week interacting with faculty (less than an hour a week, compared to 1-2
hours for private college seniors) and that our students are much less likely to discuss
academic issues with faculty. So the picture is one of positive interactions that are mostly
social and spiritual in nature—not academic. Students at other private colleges are more
likely to do research with faculty (and are twice as likely to publish with faculty), are
more likely to talk about coursework, and are more likely to get faculty assistance with
their study skills. Now maybe we could explain the difference in study skills help by
remembering that our students had higher grades in high school, but that doesn’t help us
much with the difference in academic discussions and research with faculty!
The second area I explored for “good practices” was cooperation among students.
In this area there are very few differences of note when we compare CCCU students to
students at other private colleges. Our students are slightly more likely to discuss their
courses with other students (69.6% vs. 67.8%), to study with other students (96.3% vs.
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95.5%), and to do group projects in class (97.6% vs. 97%) – but these are not statistically
significant differences. When we ask our graduating seniors about their gain over the
past four years in college in their ability to work cooperatively with other students, we
see a small but statistically significant difference, in that students in other private colleges
are more likely to report a strong gain in this ability as a result of their college
experiences (24.4% report “much stronger abilities and skills,” vs. 21.7% in the CCCU).
The third area I explored was active learning. The National Survey of Student
Engagement defines this as including the following behaviors: asking questions in class,
contributing to class discussions, making class presentations, working with classmates
outside of class to prepare class assignments, working with other students on projects
during class, tutoring or teaching other students, participating in community-based
projects as part of regular courses (i.e., service learning), and discussing ideas from
readings or class with others. Here is an area where CCCU students report significantly
more active learning (p < .05) in their first year of college compared to the rest of the
NSSE sample (a sample comprised of 276 public and private institutions). But by the
senior year this difference disappears – all students report more active learning, and there
are no differences between the experiences of CCCU seniors and seniors at other colleges
and universities.
When we examine this “good practice” from a faculty perspective, to see what
faculty report doing in their classrooms, we see an interesting picture. CCCU faculty
report more experiential learning (such as field trips, demonstrations, and labs), but
slightly less cooperative learning and a significantly higher reliance on extensive
lecturing as a predominant pedagogical strategy. But perhaps the most interesting aspect
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of this is the gender imbalance: male faculty in the CCCU are twice as likely to report
extensive lecturing as women faculty do—and women faculty are twice as likely to report
cooperative learning and other active learning strategies. This same gender imbalance in
teaching techniques exists at other private colleges, interestingly enough—but the gap is
wider in the CCCU.
The fourth “good practice” we examined was prompt feedback. The Student
Satisfaction Inventory measures students’ satisfaction with timely feedback from
faculty—and our students are significantly more satisfied than students at other private
colleges (p < .001). But despite this significantly higher satisfaction level, our students
are still only “somewhat satisfied” in this area (a score of 5.09 on a 7-point scale).
Another aspect of feedback is allowing multiple drafts of written work. Our students and
faculty alike report that CCCU faculty are less likely to allow or encourage this practice
(14.4% “frequently” do this, compared to 18.7% at other private colleges). Again we see
a gender imbalance—women faculty are twice as likely to allow multiple drafts as are
men faculty. An interesting point to note is that CCCU students report writing
significantly more papers than do students at other private colleges, but are much less
likely to report an improvement in their writing ability during college – could one
explanation possibly be that they are not getting the opportunity to actually improve
specific writing skills that multiple drafts of their work would provide?
The fifth “good practice” is time on task. This is a difficult area to measure, and
only limited evidence is available from our data—and most of it is indirect. Our
graduating seniors report studying about the same as do students at other private colleges
(between 6 and 10 hours per week), but they are carrying heavier course loads! So the
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actual “hours per class” spent studying ends up being less—and nowhere near the “two
hours outside of class for every hour in class” rule of thumb that is so near and dear to a
faculty member’s heart! So what are they are doing with their time? CCCU students are
much more likely to be working for pay and doing volunteer work; they are also much
more likely to be reading for pleasure and praying or meditating. They are much less
likely to be socializing with their friends, watching TV, surfing the internet, attending
student events, or “partying.” So there is some good news in this area, although our
students certainly could be spending more time on academic pursuits.
What about high expectations—the sixth “good practice” identified by Chickering
and Gamson? Here again we have a mixed picture. CCCU faculty are significantly more
likely to identify preparation for grad school as a “very important” or even “essential”
goal for undergrads (70.5% agree with this, compared to 65.7% of faculty at other private
colleges). But our graduating seniors are actually less likely to report that faculty
“frequently” encouraged them to pursue grad school. So what happens to those lower
degree aspirations that we saw in our entering students—do we have any impact on their
intention to go to grad school? The answer is that about 1 in 4 of our graduates goes
directly on to grad school (fewer than in other private colleges), and the gain in our
students’ degree aspirations is greater than that seen in other private colleges – especially
among our women students. But again gender provides an interesting dimension: while
CCCU women have experienced significant increases in their intention to go to grad
school, they are significantly less likely to do so right after graduation and are still
significantly less likely to pursue grad school than men are—a far different picture than
what is seen in private colleges, where women outnumber men in both their intention to
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pursue an advanced degree and in their actual behavior of going to grad school directly
after graduation. The picture in the CCCU seems to be that we are having an enormous
impact on our students’ intentions to pursue an advanced degree, particularly among our
women students—but we are not closing the “gender gap” that existed in our students
from the very beginning.
Another aspect of high expectations has to do with the level of academic
challenge that students report. Academic challenge is measured in the NSSE as preparing
for class, studying, reading, writing, using higher-order thinking skills such as analysis,
synthesis, evaluation, and application, working harder than they thought they could to
meet instructors’ standards, and an institutional environment that emphasizes studying
and academic work. In their first year of college, CCCU students report the same levels
of academic challenge as do students at other private colleges. But by the senior year a
different picture emerges: CCCU seniors report significantly higher levels of academic
challenge than do students at other private colleges (p < .05), and this is confirmed by the
College Student Survey as well. From the evidence, it appears that CCCU schools are
doing well in the area of providing an academic challenging environment for our students
– at least by the time they are seniors!
The final “good practice” I examined was the level of respect for diverse talents
and ways of learning. The Student Satisfaction Inventory measures two specific aspects
of this practice: “Faculty take into consideration student differences as they teach a
course,” and “Faculty are fair and unbiased in their treatment of individual students.” On
both these items CCCU students are significantly more satisfied than are students at other
private colleges (p < .001), but again the picture is of being “somewhat satisfied” (scores
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of about 5 on a 7-point scale). When I have conducted focus groups of students on
CCCU campuses over the years, I have found that students expect faculty to teach to a
variety of learning styles—today’s students are very aware of their own learning style
and have perhaps unrealistic expectations that faculty know how to teach to that
particular style and will do so consistently. One disturbing note is that more faculty in
the CCCU are likely to agree with the statement that “an institutional commitment to
diversity yields underprepared students” (27.7% agree or strongly agree, compared to
24.9% in private colleges) – and again, men faculty are twice as likely to agree with that
statement as are women faculty.
The final area of the Astin model that provides evidence for us is in “outputs” –
that is, what students report gaining from their college experience. In broad terms, the
SSI tells us students are significantly more satisfied with their academic experience on
our campuses: they report greater satisfaction with their intellectual growth, with course
content in their majors, with the quality of instruction, with the expertise and knowledge
of faculty, and with academic advising. And the quality of academic advising is one of
the key contributors to students’ judgments of total academic quality, as we know from
previous research. Data from our graduating seniors rounds out this picture with greater
levels of reported satisfaction with science and math courses, and with the relevance of
their coursework to their life. When we conduct a multiple regression of items
contributing to students’ overall perception that “it is an enjoyable experience being a
student on this campus,” we find that institutional commitment to academic excellence,
excellent instruction, and valuable course content in the major predict a significant
amount of the variance in students’ total experience. This is good news indeed!
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Our seniors report slightly lower satisfaction levels than students at other private
colleges in only three areas of their academic experience with us: General education
courses, Humanities courses, and Social Sciences courses.
But what about our students’ perceived gains in knowledge, skills, and academic
dispositions? Where is the value-added component of Christian higher education?
The context for answering this question is provided by the College Student Survey
given to graduating seniors on our campuses. Interestingly, for both CCCU students and
students at other private colleges, the only area where even a majority of students reports
“much stronger abilities than when I started college” is in their knowledge of a particular
field or discipline. On the whole, few college seniors anywhere are reporting much
stronger abilities – in anything – as a result of their college experience.
There are two areas where CCCU seniors report greater gains than those seen at
other private colleges: knowledge of a particular field or discipline (p < .01), and
knowledge of people from different races or cultures (greater gain, but not statistically
significant). In all other areas, CCCU students are less likely than are students at other
private colleges to report “much stronger” abilities than when they started college. In
some of these areas, the differences are statistically significant: analytical and problemsolving skills, foreign language ability, writing skills, and math skills. Overall, CCCU
students perceive their strongest “gains” from their college experience to be in their
knowledge of their major field, their general knowledge, their religious beliefs and
convictions, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. This is fairly similar to the gains
reported by student in other private colleges, with the exception of religious beliefs and
convictions—which is replaced with problem-solving skills.
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Another way of examining the “value-added” component of a Christian college
education is to explore students’ reported life goals and how those have changed since
their first year of college. What does this tell us about their learning experiences with us?
Here we see some additional good news: our students’ gains are greater in some
important ways. CCCU students’ gain in the goal of “becoming an authority in my field”
is three times as great as that seen in other private college students; their gain in desire to
“help others in difficulty” is twice as great, as is their desire to “develop a meaningful
philosophy of life,” (which, interestingly enough, our students had lower interest in as
first-year students than did students at other private colleges). But the greatest gain seen
in our students’ life goals as a result of being in college is in their intent to “keep up to
date with political affairs.”
To summarize this wealth of confusing data, we can readily conclude that CCCU
students are very satisfied with their academic experience – significantly moreso than are
students at other private colleges. And they have changed in some significant ways as a
result of their college experience. Some indicators of a quality learning experience are
more evident on CCCU campuses than on other private college campuses: emotional
support from our faculty, intellectual challenge and stimulation in our seniors’
classrooms, active learning (at least in the first year), and significant reported gains in
their chosen major. The areas where our students report lesser gains are relatively few
and the differences fairly small. But I am left wondering, “is that all there is? Is a
Christian college education pretty much like any other private college education—except
that you just add religion and stir? And if that is the case, is that a cause for celebration?”
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So while I am pleased that our students are significantly more satisfied and report
a number of good educational practices on our campuses – certainly enough
“ammunition” to help our admissions counselors as they recruit prospective students who
are concerned about academic quality – I want to go back to Chickering and Gamson’s
“good practices” and ask the question: where do we go from here? How do we capitalize
on our strengths to take us to a new level of academic excellence?
One of our strengths is our student-faculty interaction. Our faculty are supportive,
encouraging, and invite students into their homes. But imagine how much more this
interaction could impact our students if when we invited them into our homes we were
discussing academics with them, as well as social and spiritual issues! One of the most
rewarding experiences of my teaching career was when I regularly invited sophomore
psychology majors to my home on Monday nights to collaborate with me on research.
This group of 7 or 8 sophomores knew that their choice of a “no name” Christian college
handicapped their ability to get into grad school – but that the ability to do research with
faculty, and especially to publish or present that research, would significantly enhance
their application! So we met each week, discussing research interests, designing multiple
projects and assigning partners. From research at the University of Michigan (see Nagda,
Gregerman, Jonides, von Hippel, & Lerner, 1998) that has been done since those early
years of my career, we now know that the sophomore year is the pivotal year – it is in this
year that research with faculty has the most significant impact on student retention in
particular. And we now know that doing research with faculty is an especially effective
practice with students of color and with “at-risk” students – it has a greater impact on not
only their retention, but on their total achievement in college. What a gift this is to us, as
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we anticipate the enormously diverse student population ready to enter higher education
in the next decade! This is certainly a strategy that Christian higher education can use to
provide an excellent academic experience to incoming students of color. But it will
necessitate a shift in our thinking about faculty-student research: it is not just for honors
students in the upper levels of our major!
We also need to capitalize on our strength of campus climate and sense of
community, evidenced in the cooperation among our students, by expanding our vision of
community. While Christian colleges do an excellent job of providing a sense of
community to our students, we have not done as well at communicating that we are an
academic community. Without detracting from our strength of community, we need to
add to it a vision for academic community in the classroom. While we are still
predominantly residential campuses, that is a trend that may change with the incoming
diversity of learners – and with so many of our students working off campus, we will
increasingly see the classroom as the primary location for community to occur.
Vince Tinto (1998) writes convincingly of the need for universities to create
“connected, seamless learning” between the curricular and co-curricular elements of our
students’ experiences, and he is a strong advocate of learning communities as one way of
accomplishing this. By block scheduling cohorts of 15-20 students into two or three
classes that are team-taught, interdisciplinary in nature, and connected around a common
theme, students experience powerful learning through “shared knowledge and shared
knowing – constructing a shared, coherent educational experience that promotes higher
levels of cognitive complexity, … while asking students to construct knowledge
together—to share the experience of learning as a community of learners.” Tinto goes on
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to say this promotes “intellectual development as well as an appreciation for the many
ways in which one’s knowing is enhanced when other ‘voices’ are part of that knowing”
(p. 171). An example of this approach is a first-year seminar course (3 credits) connected
to an English composition course (3 credits) and a Psychology course (3 credits)
organized around the theme, “The Search for Self.” The 3 faculty work together to
integrate the readings, the assignments, the classroom activities, and out-of-class
activities so that students experience the 9 credits as a connected learning experience with
the same 15-20 students who are potential psychology majors and are advised by the
first-year seminar instructor, who is on the psychology faculty.
Active learning continues this theme. From research done by George Kuh and his
associates (Kuh & Vesper, 1997), we know that active learning is correlated .47 with
gains in student knowledge and .46 with gains in students’ intellectual skills; these are
significantly positive correlations. The CCCU needs to capitalize on its existing strength
here—the evidence shows we are providing active learning opportunities for our firstyear students, and our women faculty use these strategies fairly consistently across the
curriculum. We need to see active learning as a professional development opportunity
for our faculty so that we can increase our levels of good practice in this area. What do
we mean by active learning? Probably the best way to describe it is as “dialogue and
communication -- interactive, cooperative, and relational, rather than transmission -- the
efficient flow of information down the pipeline” (Tiberius, 1986).
Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching, describes it this way: “activity, reflection, collaboration, and passion among
learners + generative content and the creation of powerful learning communities =
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maximum learning.” Note that the emphasis is on the learning, not the teaching! In an
active learning model, learning is seen as reciprocal, students are actively involved with
the subject matter, there are high levels of student participation, innovation and creativity
are nurtured, and a variety of learning styles are addressed. Faculty can use a variety of
strategies that suit their own style and are comfortable for them – the point is for students
to be actively engaged in their own learning process. Some faculty use carefully planned
small group activities (not an exchange of ignorance while you go get a cup of coffee!),
others use case studies, simulations, problem-solving exercises, journaling, class
discussions, technology, outside speakers, and a variety of out-of-class assignments.
Richard Light, in his excellent book Making the Most of College (2001), reports
the results of interviews with thousands of successful college seniors who were asked to
describe their “best professor ever.” Their answers provide illumination for us as faculty
as we strive to create an excellent academic environment for our students:
(a) they did not teach me what to think, but taught me how to think, (b) they
helped me make connections between a serious academic curriculum and my own
personal life, values, and experiences, (c) they engaged students in the learning
process, (d) they asked questions, posed problems, and encouraged debate as part
of the process of teaching us how to think like professionals in our discipline, (e)
they taught me the importance of evidence-- how to collect it, and how to use it to
make decisions, and (f) they incorporated other disciplines into their classes.
Prompt feedback – also an area of relative strength – could be an area where we
could set our sights higher. In focus groups, students report frustration at several aspects
of faculty feedback: one is its timeliness – or as a senior forlornly expressed it, “I’m a
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senior, and there are some papers from my freshman year I still haven’t gotten back!”
When we ask students to define “timely feedback,” they uniformly agree that two weeks
is a reasonable amount of time to grade a test or paper. More importantly, they state that
knowing when to expect the paper to be returned as well as getting an assignment back
before they have to start the next one are critical components. Most students will wait
patiently for a paper to be returned if you have at least told them it will be three weeks
until you get them graded.
Another aspect of feedback that is important to students is having the opportunity
to write multiple drafts before getting a final grade on an assignment. Giving students
feedback on a first draft, or even grading their paper but returning it and having them
make corrections and resubmit it to improve their grade, are effective ways of providing a
substantive, meaningful learning experience. As I mentioned earlier, simply “writing a
lot” appears not to affect student learning – it is writing, getting feedback, and then rewriting that appears to make the difference.
And of course feedback involves comments, not just a grade at the end of the
paper. You can imagine students’ frustration when they see no marks or comments
throughout a paper, but there is a D on the last page. Students in focus groups express the
most frustration with this aspect of feedback; they want feedback to be meaningful and to
tell them how to improve.
To increase the level of “time on task” in our students, so that their learning is
enhanced, I believe it is important for us to address the ethos of our campus – the campus
culture. Is it an academic ethos? When prospective students come to campus, what
experiences do we ensure they have – have we scheduled classroom visits, interviews
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with a faculty member, attendance of a campus debate or guest speaker? Or have we
scheduled residence hall visits, interviews with an athletic coach, and attendance of
chapel and a packed house at a basketball game? Our students have the tendency to
compartmentalize their lives without our help – separating their daily activities into their
“social life,” their “spiritual life,” and their “academic life.” Few of them would think of
studying as an act of worship, in all likelihood. Yet what are we intentionally doing to
counteract this natural tendency toward “separate spheres” of life? How much
cooperation is there between the academic side of the house and the student life side?
Are our chapel programs intellectually as well as spiritually engaging? Does the student
life program expand on the learning in the classroom, so that “seamless learning
experiences” characterize our co-curricular events? And to get really radical here: if we
were genuinely practicing faith-learning integration in the classroom, would we need to
require our students to attend chapel?
The sixth “good practice” identified by Chickering and Gamson which is a
strength upon which the CCCU can capitalize is high expectations. Thankfully, our
students report intellectual challenge and stimulation, but perhaps an area of growth for
us is grade inflation. While this is a problem on virtually every campus in the nation—
including Harvard—it does give one pause to hear that 75% of the senior class graduated
“with honors” – somehow it loses its meaning! Perhaps by focusing on providing the
appropriate balance of challenge and support – maintaining high standards, but also
providing support to students by teaching them the skills needed to meet the standards –
we can create an even greater distinctive for Christian colleges. “Working harder than
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they thought they could to meet an instructor’s standards” is one of the hallmarks of
engaged learning.
Finally, respecting diverse talents and ways of learning is an important and much
needed practice for the CCCU as we face enormous increases in the numbers of diverse
learners seeking higher education in the next decade. Students of color, in particular,
often have different learning styles, many of which our faculty simply are unaware or do
not know how to facilitate. Along with faculty development workshops for active
learning, teaching faculty about students’ learning styles and how to facilitate learning
and engage a variety of diverse learners is a vital task for the CCCU. Quoting Lee
Shulman again,
learning is a dual process of ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in.’ To prompt learning,
you’ve got to begin with the process of going from inside out. The first influence
on new learning is not what teachers do pedagogically but the learning that’s
already inside the learner. The most important single factor influencing learning
is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him/her accordingly.
Learners construct their sense of the world by applying their old understandings to
new experiences and ideas. That new learning is enriched enormously by the
ways in which people wrestle with such ideas on the “outside,” before they bring
those ideas back inside and make them their own. This is why we must support
learners in the active, collaborative, reflective reexamination of ideas in a social
context.
For guidance in this area, the work happening at Azusa Pacific University and
other CCCU campuses with the Gallup Organization’s StrengthsQuest program is
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instructive. Chip Anderson will be conducting a workshop tomorrow on this topic, but
the strengths initiative is being used on about 15 campuses in the CCCU with significant
results on students’ academic self-confidence, engagement in learning, academic
achievement, and retention. By focusing on the talents and gifts that God has given each
of our students, we can provide a strong foundation for motivating them to apply those
gifts and strengths to new areas of learning or areas in need of improvement. The secret
to academic achievement is engaging students in their own learning process—and the
strengths approach provides a powerful way of doing that. This could easily be a
“distinctive” of Christian higher education that is very compelling to students and their
families as they are choosing a college education.
To conclude today, I want to leave you with a challenge. Those of you who know
me or have heard me speak before know that I always end with a challenge to “go and
do.” My challenge to you – to us – today is to step up to the plate. Christian higher
education has a strong academic foundation, with enormous potential to impact the
world. Yet too often we abandon the hard intellectual work to the secular universities;
we don’t even try to go head-to-head with the leading philosophers, researchers,
scientists, or educators of the world. Christian colleges are too often viewed as nice
places to send your daughters, places where they will be safe and grow spiritually and
personally (and perhaps find a husband), but not necessarily places where they will be
challenged and equipped to take on the world on its playing field. But if we really want
to make an impact on the world—for the sake of Christ and his kingdom—we simply
must be excellent at what we do, which is educating the whole student: body, soul, heart
and mind.
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