Positive Impacts Of Student Engagement And High Impact Practices

Institutions of higher education often struggle to find strategies that successfully engage students in learning. In the article “Faculty Work, Student Success,” Colleen Flaherty attempts to address this problem by analyzing the benefits that undergraduate research has on students and faculty. However, she points out that faculty have a hard time balancing the demands of focusing on teaching students while keeping up with research, without sacrificing the quality of one or both pursuits. Flaherty uses the College of New Jersey, as an example of an institution that took a risk and did a complete reformation of their curriculum focusing on the teacher-scholar model and undergraduate research (Flaherty, 2014). Since the implementation of the program in 2004, it had benefited both students and faculty alike such as increased retention and recruitment rates and increased student-faculty interactions (Flaherty, 2014). The new curriculum lightened the faculty teaching requirement to three courses a semester than were focused on undergraduate research and scheduled time to pursue their own research while encouraged to include students in that as well (Flaherty, 2014). While this new model has worked well for this university to engage students in learning through an emphasis on undergraduate research and balancing the faculty’s workload by changing their curriculum, this model may just not be feasible for some institutions since they vary greatly in size, focus, and resources, etc.

The three purposes and missions of higher education are education, research, and public service. The first one to be addressed is education. In his paper, “Goals: The Intended Outcomes of Higher Education,” author Bowen (1977) has stated education is “not only the academic curricula, classes, and laboratories, but also all those influences upon students flowing from association with peers and faculty members and from the many and varied experiences of campus” (p. 24). Educating students is an important mission for higher education, but educating students is not limited to their academics. The mission for higher education involving education can be categorized as cognitive learning, affective development, and practical competence (Bowen, 1977, p. 27). While cognitive learning is based on expanding on students’ knowledge, affective development and practical competence are based on the overall being of the student. The intent of affective development is to help enhance

Engaged Heritage High School students in the area of college access by facilitating workshops and large group presentations

Student involvement has been identified in some cases as positive factor in African American male retention. Astin (2003) emphasized the psychological and behavioral dimensions of being involved on campus and underscored the importance of involvement to student retention and persistence. To contrast, Flowers (2006) found that Black men were less integrated academically and socially than their same race counterparts in four-year institutions, indicating a need to increase campus engagement for Black male community college students.

Beginning in the fall of 2007, the Red Hook Community Justice Center carried out an experimental project to address the growing crime rates in the neighborhoods youth community. Youth engagement has been shown to decrease and delinquency (Zeldin, 2004). The youth members of this neighborhood were mainly Black and Latino and heavily participants in the local drug trade. Borrowing from existing safe-sex models, ethnographic research methods were employed over the course of two months to collect data about the individuals between the ages of thirteen and eighteen in the local population (White, 2008). A total twenty eight participants were interviewed from October 2008 to June 2009.

Transitioning from secondary education to postsecondary education, I feared that I would lose my connection with the development of the student body. Instead, I gained valuable knowledge pertaining to the mission, vision and goals of

In Table 3.2, we tabulated the responses to the academic engagement portion of the survey. Again, the responses were overwhelmingly positive. However, there was some dissatisfaction with the areas of academic advising, faculty praise, and rewards. It is interesting to note that the DNIMAS students were rather critical in retrospect with themselves or their own selfevaluation.

As I finish up my practicum hours this week, I am amazed at how everything has come full circle. As someone who came into college with no clue of what I wanted to do after graduation, I found that the Office of Student Engagement allowed me to develop as a person and figure out the things that are most important to me. As I started to get more involved on-campus and take on more leadership roles, I started to gain an interest in working in the field of higher education in hopes to provide this same experience to other college students. By having the opportunity to work with Patrick Dezort, the Director of Student Development and Engagement at Felician University, as part of my Field Practicum in Psychology course, I was hoping to get

To engage ourselves in learning is to bring ourselves closer to understanding the world around us. I come from a background which encouraged learning not simply for a test or competition, but for the expansion of the proliferating mind. Learning without engagement is fruitless because it lacks the spark of curiosity required for any hope of tangible academic progression and helping the society around us. Through making learning engaging through discourse, I believe my potential contribution to the Trinity community is a rare one. Through engaging the community in conversation, ideas can be shared which ultimately leads to a deeper understanding how we can help the world through what we do in academia. My deep-rooted mission to the Trinity Community is one where I can help the college engage the wider urban community to become excited about learning, which ultimately leads to a society where the voice of the people is heard, and our work at the College will help the people to wholistically become a more intelligent

Many institutions face challenges retaining and graduating community college students. Students, faculty, staff, and administrators need work together to find ways to help these students succeed. Through the use of the Achieving the Dream initiative, the organization can help community colleges and their students to stay with their school and become successful academically and professionally.

Since the 1990s, service-learning and volunteerism have become pervasive throughout higher education. Many campuses now have a center for civic engagement and have hired service-learning coordinators. Large organizations and initiatives have dedicated themselves to promoting and enhancing engagement research and practices. We even have engaged campus awards and designations at the national and state level. Civic engagement is a professional field of study and practice and it is our best hope for bringing in a discussion about sense of community.

A civic engagement program similar to SPR outside of Duke University is Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR). The CEPR is a partnership amongst school districts, foundations, states, and university researchers that assists in leveraging the large amount of new data about schools, teachers, and students to address “intractable policy questions in education.” Similar to SRP, the goal is to improve educational outcomes for all students; however, the CEPR attempts to achieve this by building a network amongst teachers around the country instead of just locally. Both organizations strive to engage the social scientists on what does and does not need to change. The CEPR claims to have “an irreplaceable role to play in

The goal of this poster is two-fold. First, we will demonstrate the effectiveness of the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRAA) grant awarded to an HSI that focused on institutional capacity building. In particular, it provided funding in the development of the Student Center for Science Engagement (SCSE) at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU). Next, we will discuss the impact of the SCSE in significantly improving the trend of retention and graduation rates of students in the STEM disciplines, with particular attention to

The results from the survey associated with VCU’s co-curricular activities highlighted the focus on one particular co-curricular opportunity, ASPiRE. The VCU Co-Curricular Program: Academic Scholars Program in Real Environment (ASPiRE), was established in 2012 to enrich and deepen students’ understanding of their capacity to create positive change in communities (Virginia Commonwealth University ASPiRE, 2012) and also due in part to a trend of low graduation rates in comparison to Virginia public state institutions; VCU identified in 2011 only 34% of their student population was graduating in four years (Hayes & DiPeppe, 2011). The establishment of the VCU’s ASPiRE program focused

Brown University is one many universities that currently have a two semester capstone course (Brown University, 2015). A two semester capstone class provides students with a gateway into a potential career and presents them with the chance to apply the skills learned in the classroom to real-life scenarios (Atchison, 1993). The students at Brown University, are required to complete a project or internship during their first semester of the capstone project, which emphasis interdisciplinary practice which is becoming an essential skill in the workplace (Brown University, 2015). During the second semester of the capstone class, students are required to write a paper that incorporates the experience gained from the project as well as the knowledge acquired from past classes in the program (Brown University, 2015). Taking these examples, into consideration this paper will proceed by proposing a possible two semester capstone course for the University of Maryland, School of Public