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“Proponents
of liberal arts education make claims based on the
sort of information we wouldn’t accept in
a paper by a Wabash freshman. If we’re going
make claims about the effectiveness of liberal arts
education, we need to find out if the data supports
such statements.”
Anne
Bost, research fellow, the Center of Inquiry in
the Liberal Arts at Wabash College
Educational researcher
Ernie Pascarella arrived at the Center of Inquiry
in the Liberal Arts at Wabash last summer convinced
that liberal arts colleges were no more inherently
effective at teaching students than any other form
of higher education. That conviction was based on
more than 30 years experience, during which he’d
conducted groundbreaking studies, surveyed reams
of data, and co-authored How College Affects Students,
among the most respected books on higher educational
teaching and learning.
“I’ve
seen very little evidence of differences between
types of institutions when it comes to educational
practices,” the University of Iowa-based researcher
told those gathered for the Center’s inquiry
on “Analyzing the Impact of the Liberal Arts.”
But the Center’s
Director of Inquiries Charlie Blaich had looked
at the same data from Pascarella’s National
Survey of Student Learning (NSSL) and noticed that
many of the teaching and learning practices that
Pascarella’s research identified as most effective
were also most likely to occur in liberal arts colleges.
With funding from the Center, Blaich invited the
researcher to review the same data from the 5-year
longitudinal study of 21 different colleges and
research universities, this time focusing on the
occurrence of “good practices” in three
different types of institutions: liberal arts colleges,
regional colleges and universities, and national
research universities.
Eight months later,
the veteran researcher returned with a change of
heart.
“I’ve
never seen differences in institutional effects
this big or this consistent,” Pascarella told
the second meeting of the inquiry group.
“In terms of
academic good practices, student-faculty contact,
high expectations, student-to-student contact, and
academic effort, liberal arts colleges appear to
be doing something more advantageous for students
than are research universities or regional colleges.
“And it’s
not a function of liberal arts schools being selective,”
Pascarella insisted. “Selectivity has very
little to do with good practices—you can’t
judge the education you’ll receive by how
hard it is to get into the school.
“And it’s
not just a function of liberal arts colleges having
more students living on campus, or having more full-time
students.
“Liberal arts
colleges are doing something else that leads us
to these results,” Pascarella says. “What
that is, we don’t know. That’s the next
step.”
Pascarella wants
to find out if the good practices attributed to
liberal arts colleges in the NSSL lead to higher
proficiency in reading comprehension, math skills,
critical thinking, and scientific reasoning. His
team is studying results this spring and summer,
with hopes of reporting its findings in late summer.
“The outcome
of this next step will be critical,” Wabash
Dean Mauri Ditzler ’75 says. Pascarella agrees.
“We may find
out that liberal arts schools do things well, but
the outcomes aren’t as clear,” Pascarella
says. “They might be doing the right things,
but we could be measuring the wrong outcomes. Or
maybe good practices such as these only help with
critical thinking and psycho-social outcomes, but
have very little to do with math and science reasoning.
We don’t know—but we will soon!”
Blaich, a social
scientist by training and an associate professor
of psychology at Wabash, is eager to see the results,
though he knows the risks of such a study.
“We may find
that some of our assumptions about pedagogy and
what works, what doesn’t, have been wrong,
or at least overstated,” says Blaich. “And
we may be surprised to find other practices that
work even better than we thought. The results may
upset some people, but that’s a risk we have
to take.
“We‘ve
relied for too long on anecdotal evidence alone,”
Blaich says, emphasizing that the Center will conduct
both qualitative and quantitive studies. “Stories
are important, but so are the numbers. We’ll
be examing both.
“How can we
expect prospective students, parents, and the public
to trust us if we’re not willing to put our
methods under the same intellectual scrutiny we
claim to develop in our students?”
Keep in touch with
the latest developments at the Center at: www.liberalarts.wabash.edu
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