A primary locus of these activities is University College , the academic home for new students at IUPUI. UC opened in 1997 and was dedicated in 1998, following several years of experimentation, sponsored by the Undergraduate Education Center, aimed at creating first-year experiences that would ease students" transition to college-level work and provide them with strong connections to the learning process, to their peers, and to faculty. This work emerged initially from the higher education literature, particularly the literature on learning communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which suggested that such communities might be an especially effective strategy for retaining commuter students (see, for example, Tinto, Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition, 1993). More recent UC efforts have focused on using assessment findings to refine models originally imported from elsewhere to make them as effective as possible for IUPUI"s specific student population.
UC currently has 64 appointed faculty members, drawn from all undergraduate units on campus. This group makes key policy decisions and develops UC programs and initiatives. UC also includes a large advising staff, who work actively with students. Thus, while its offerings span a wide range of disciplines, UC is a true school, not an administrative unit.
A central element of the UC model is a first-year seminar(PDF) -known as a "learning community"-intended to provide an intensive orientation to IUPUI, to the skills needed for college-level study, and to the many support resources available within UC and across the campus. Taught by an instructional team that includes a faculty member, a librarian, an advisor, and a peer mentor, the seminar provides new students with easy access to advising and mentoring and helps them learn to "navigate" the IUPUI campus at the outset of their academic careers.
Following a number of pilots and much restructuring based on assessment findings, the first-year seminar program was extended across the entire campus in the late 1990s. (For a detailed analysis of this history, see the RUSS Self-Study(PDF) .) Currently, first-year seminars are offered by all undergraduate units and enroll 65 percent of entering freshmen. (The aim is ultimately to enroll all entering freshmen.) UC retains a central coordinating role through the First-Year Studies Committee and the IUPUI Learning Community Network.
All first-year seminars introduce students to the critical elements of success in college, with the discipline-based ones adding an introduction to the discipline or department for students already admitted or planning to seek admission to those schools. An important feature of the seminars is their strong emphasis on active and collaborative learning, as well as on development of skills in critical thinking and information literacy. A template(PDF) developed by UC for the first-year seminars includes anticipated learning outcomes, recommended pedagogical strategies, and required curriculum components, in order to ensure that all new students are exposed to key information, resources, and learning experiences in their first semester. (Click here to see several examples of First-Year Seminars offered by UC and other units.)
A second critical feature of UC is that it brings together crucial student support resources and programs in a single physical location. UC is home to such units as the Advising Center, the Career Center, the Learning Center, the Mathematics Assistance Center , and a branch of the University Writing Centers. In addition, UC sponsors a number of IUPUI"s pre-college programs, such as SPAN and Upward Bound, new student orientation, and a summer bridge program for new students. UC also houses other important campus-wide programs, such as the University Honors Program and the IUPUI Center for Service and Learning. Thus, new students can find most of the help and information they need in one building that is designed to provide a welcoming, student-friendly environment. Equally important, the efforts of the various centers and programs can be coordinated, and assessment findings and good practices can be quickly disseminated among key units.
UC also serves as the administrative home and coordinator for a number of major campus initiatives to improve undergraduate education, such as the Gateway Program (where UC works in collaboration with the Office for Professional Development ), and for IUPUI"s participation in a number of national initiatives, including the Greater Expectations project, sponsored by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the Restructuring for Urban Student Success Project (RUSS). Placing these campus improvement initiatives under one administration helps to ensure that they are integrated with one another and with UC"s academic offerings and support services. For example, Greater Expectations focuses on core collegiate learning outcomes, such as critical thinking and written and oral communication. At IUPUI, these outcomes are encapsulated in the Principles of Undergraduate Learning, which most students initially learn about in the first-year seminar. Bringing Greater Expectations under the same administration as the first-year seminars allows coordination between the two programs. (Click here to link to a brief report on the Greater Expectations Web site on IUPUI"s work with the project.)
Similarly, a core component of the Gateway Program, discussed in detail later in this self-study, is Structured Learning Assistance (SLA), which is offered under the aegis of UC"s Learning Center. The Writing Center and the Mathematics Assistance Center also play critical roles in the Gateway Program. The fact that these programs are under one administration and one roof makes it easier for them to align efforts to achieve the goals of the Gateway initiative.
Assessment of UC Programs
Because UC"s mission directly targets enhanced student learning of core collegiate learning outcomes and improved retention of first-year students-priorities critical to IUPUI"s effectiveness as an institution-assessment has been intrinsic to its operations from the outset. Substantial resources are committed to UC assessment: in addition to assessment work conducted by UC"s own staff, the Office of Information Management and Institutional Research (IMIR) includes a staff member assigned to support UC assessment efforts, while OPD and UC share a staff member whose role includes qualitative assessment of UC programs. In addition, a UC Faculty Fellows Program(PDF) has supported a range of special, targeted assessment projects. (For a summary of UC assessment approaches and initiatives, click here.)
During UC"s first several years, assessment efforts focused broadly on the program"s overall impact on student grades and retention, comparing new students who participated in UC programs with non-participants. (Click here for a report on initial UC assessment efforts.) As UC programs expanded and were refined, based on early assessment findings, assessment efforts became more focused, examining the impact of specific interventions, such as SLA or the use of peer mentors, for example. (For an overview of this more focused approach, see Part 2 of the Fall 2000 Enrollment Report.) UC assessment methods include both quantitative and qualitative approaches and are intended to serve both formative and summative purposes, so that findings yield information not only on program impact, but on the reasons for that impact, and on unmet needs. Using a range of approaches, including focus groups and personal interviews, to tease out information on why certain outcomes do or do not result, as well as on what outcomes result, is especially important for improving the effectiveness of the programs as they mature.
Ongoing UC assessment processes use a three-phase approach:
- Needs assessment, conducted via an entering student survey, student satisfaction surveys, non-returning student surveys, and through special task forces and Faculty Fellowships.
- Process assessment, which examines alignment between program concept and implementation, using focus groups, interviews, questionnaires, and special studies, such as the RUSS self-study.
- Outcomes assessment, focused on determining how well programs are meeting their goals, using information on the impact of specific interventions on retention and academic performance, survey results, and students" self-reported learning gains.
In addition to these ongoing assessments, UC has conducted and sponsored a number of special assessment initiatives, including the RUSS Project, the Gateway Program, the Learning Center Task Force, the Transitional Education Task Force, and the various projects carried out by the Faculty Fellows. (Click here for a summary of these projects)
Assessment at UC has led to substantial refinement of its approaches to working with first-year students. For example, the initial pilot experiments with first-year seminars used a broad-stroke, "one size fits all" approach, where course content and activities were more or less interchangeable among seminar sections. More recently, information gathered through assessment has led to the development of seminar sections tailored to student interests and needs-e.g., seminars for honors students, non-traditional-aged students, students with interests in specific majors, and students with particular learning needs.
Other examples of changes made by UC as a result of assessment findings include:
- The addition of a set of new UC courses, "Critical Inquiry" (CI). These are reading-intensive sections linked to department-based content courses and designed to support the readings in those courses. CI uses a specific approach to helping students read and critically analyze difficult texts. In a Fall 2000 pilot, beginning freshmen enrolled in CI sections earned higher course grades in the content course and were less likely to withdraw from the course than non-CI students. These results have continued to hold true as the program has expanded in subsequent semesters.
- Adoption of the " Structured Learning Assistance" (SLA) model for high-risk-for-failure Gateway courses (i.e., introductory-level courses with high enrollments of new students). Early experiments with Supplemental Instruction in Gateway courses at IUPUI showed benefits for students who participated, but suggested that many students who would most benefit were not taking advantage of the program. SLA is a specific form of Supplemental Instruction that mandates student attendance at weekly directed study and practice sessions. The sessions provide enhanced background on course content and assistance in specific study skills required to master course material. Experience with SLA over the past two years has shown that students in SLA sections withdraw from those courses at significantly lower rates than students in non-SLA sections.
- A 2001-2002 pilot of a proposed "Administrative Withdrawal" policy, whereby students who miss more than half of a class"s meetings during the first four weeks of the semester are automatically withdrawn from the course. The pilot resulted in significantly increased retention in participating courses. As a result of the pilot"s success, the administrative withdrawal policy is in effect this fall for selected courses in the departments of English, Mathematics, Psychology, and Communication Studies, as well as in UC courses. Discussions about applying the policy campus-wide are currently underway.
- Revision of the learning communities mentor program, as a result of a Faculty Fellow"s analysis of the program. Changes included enhancements to mentor training and supervision, greater faculty involvement in mentor recruitment, and clearer definition of peer mentor roles and responsibilities.
- Block scheduling of linked courses. The learning communities model at IUPUI, until recently, did not include the course blocks usually associated with learning communities, in part because of the formidable logistics of block scheduling at a commuter campus. We have just recently begun a major initiative to develop course blocks, with support from a grant by the Lumina Foundation for Higher Education. Twenty blocks were piloted in Fall 2001 and additional blocks are under development, making our efforts in this area among the most comprehensive in the nation among urban commuter institutions. Two task forces are currently addressing a range of issues related to this initiative, from curriculum integration to scheduling logistics.
Impact of UC Programs
The years of work and intensive campus-wide effort invested in UC and related learning and retention initiatives have begun to yield tangible benefits in the form of a 3.4 percent increase over the previous year in retention of new freshmen from Fall 2000 to Fall 2001 and a 3.2 percent increase from Fall 2001 to Fall 2002. Our analysis indicates that approximately half of a percentage point of the increase from 2000 to 2001 is attributable to changes in admission standards and that half of the total change from 2001-2002 is attributable to these changes. A good portion of the remaining increases can be attributed to the program interventions discussed here. In addition, while fewer new students have enrolled for the current semester than for the Fall 2001 semester, improved retention has led to a 2.4 percent increase in overall enrollments at IUPUI , which reached an all-time high this semester of over 29,000 students.
The work of UC has led to less quantifiable, but perhaps no less beneficial, changes as well. UC has provided a highly visible model in which respected, senior faculty members, drawn from academic units across the campus, have collaborated with one another and with other staff members to address difficult teaching and learning issues. Other schools and departments have followed suit; for example, the departments of Mathematics, Psychology, Sociology, English, and Communication Studies, among others, have adopted the practice of appointing senior faculty as coordinators of large, multi-section courses and collaboratively determining desired learning outcomes for these courses and criteria for assessment of those outcomes.
These and other departments have also initiated or augmented their own efforts to encourage community and engagement among their students, particularly new students, and have enhanced advising, mentoring, and resources for student support. While IUPUI faculty certainly were dedicated to student learning prior to the existence of UC, UC"s visibility and success have provided encouragement and direction to efforts based in other campus units, supplied a prominent model of senior faculty collaboration to enhance student learning, and created a centralized location for dialogue about first-year student learning and success and for coordinating related campus-wide improvement initiatives.
UC has also been recognized as a national model: the Association of American Colleges and Universities selected IUPUI for the Greater Expectations project on the basis of UC"s accomplishments; and IUPUI was recently named a recipient of a First-Year Experience award from the national Policy Center for the First-Year of College. (Click here to read our applications materials for Greater Expectations and here for our First-Year Experience materials.) US News and World Report this year cited IUPUI"s learning communities as an example of "programs that really work" to enhance student learning.
Go on to: Active Learning Across the Campus
