Talking Stick - May/June 2008 - 18

Res Life It’s Not What They Know That Counts: It’s What They Can Do by Emily Glenn How housing professionals can contribute to assessments based upon learning outcomes. that the number of college-age students receiving degrees is slipping in the United States compared to the number in other developed countries. This assessment is backed up by a study sponsored by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the Wal-Mart Foundation’s “Making Opportunity Affordable” project and also by data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Kuh also points to the Spellings Commission report, which declared a crisis in higher education, primarily due to costs and accountability: “There’s enormous responsibility on those in charge of higher education. Regional accreditors could decide to have more focus on residence life.” If they do, it would be good to have learning outcomes and assessment methods already in place, he says. Wiltgen agrees. “There’s a growing challenge to institutions to show what they’ve done,” he says. “We talk about being educators; now we can have data to back that up.” For Piper, it’s an easy decision: “Housing is a natural environment for learning. You can either use the natural environment of people living together to promote learning in an intentional way, or you can house them, feed them, keep them happy.” But how should housing professionals embark on this project? In 1993, George Kuh and Charles Schroeder began “The Student Learning Imperative: Implications for Student Affairs” with a simple declaration: “Higher education is in the throes of a major transformation.” Kuh and Schroeder’s essay sparked a transformation of its own, by charging student affairs professionals to concern themselves not only with their residents’ room and board, but also with their social and personal development as universities were pressured to become more proactive about student learning. “It’s a paradigm shift of large proportions,” says James Wiltgen, director of residence life at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. “It’s still evolving.” “It was a catalyst for the adoption of a new paradigm in student learning,” says Terry Piper, vice president for student affairs at California State University, Northridge. Part of the paradigm shift had to do with the practical voice in Kuh and Schroeder’s paper. “A lot of George Kuh’s writing shifted to what makes a difference from a theoretical perspective to a practical perspective.” Frankie Minor, director of residential life at the University of Missouri-Columbia, agrees about the impact of this shift: “It was something that got us really thinking about what we were doing. I think too often housing professionals don’t look at our responsibility as working with students outside of class,” he says. “It’s a missed opportunity.” Kuh, a professor of higher education at Indiana University, Bloomington, says that the message of the paper is more urgent today than it was 15 years ago. “There are increasing requirements for knowing what happens to students during college.” He notes Enlist help. All the housing professionals interviewed for this story emphasized the importance of reading the literature on learning outcomes and their assessment. Minor recognizes that faculty can help with academic skills that housing professionals might not have, so his staff met with faculty to discuss how to develop a curriculum. “You need to 18 Talking Stick

Talking Stick - May/June 2008

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