Asked to sum up the collective campus housing mission in one word, many likely would choose thrive. Sure, other words like engagement, safety, learning, community, and identity might get some votes, but thriving – in its all-encompassing glory – sums up those other concepts and many others so well. And thanks to people like Laurie Schreiner, it’s a quantifiable and amenable mission as well.
Schreiner,
a professor of higher education at Azusa Pacific University in California, notes
that “thriving
is an expanded vision for student success that incorporates students'
intellectual, interpersonal, and psychological engagement and well-being while
in college.” Students
who thrive are “not only succeeding academically but
also engaged in the learning process, investing effort to reach important
educational goals, managing their time and commitments effectively, connected
in healthy ways to other people, optimistic about their future, positive about
their present choices, appreciative of differences in others, and committed to
enriching their community.”
She and
her colleagues have combined data, theory, and practice to create the Thriving
Quotient, or TQ for short, which measures “the academic,
social, and psychological aspects of a student’s college experience that are
most predictive of academic success, institutional fit, satisfaction with
college, and ultimately graduation.” These are divided into five categories:
engaged learning, academic determination, positive perspective, social
connectedness, and diverse citizenship. A similar survey is available for
faculty and staff as well.
The Talking
Stick reached out to Schreiner to learn more about her work, her favorite
student development theories, and how housing departments can help students
achieve thriving status. The following conversation is lightly edited for
clarity and length.
After
spending years studying student retention and satisfaction, I felt there was
still something missing in our approach to student success. It was at a
graduation ceremony that I started thinking about how each student who crossed
the stage was considered a success in the eyes of the
institution, but that there was a significant qualitative difference in their
experiences with us, as well as in what life after graduation looked like for
them. When I thought about what we might be missing, it seemed as if we were taking
a survival/deficit approach to student success – really just trying to avoid
failure. A student could barely meet the minimum grade point average for
graduation, and we celebrate that they “survived” college. But did college
transform them? Did it make life better for them? Were they equipped to make
the world a better place because of their time with us? It didn’t seem so to
me. The alternative approach I envisioned would be more holistic,
representative of the student’s total experience in college. It would be an
approach that considered not only academic and intellectual engagement but also
the relationships that are so vital to a meaningful life, as well as a psychological
engagement in the college experience that would provide the foundation for a
good life. I’m a psychologist by training, so a more comprehensive and holistic
definition of student success seemed intuitive to me.
The Sophomore
Experiences Survey (SES) was created in preparation for a co-edited book, Helping Sophomores Succeed: Understanding
and Improving the Second-Year Experience, that was
published by Jossey-Bass in 2010. There was a lot of interest in the sophomore
experience beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as many institutions
were discovering that front-loading their first-year experience had simply
postponed the usual attrition to the second year, when the institution turned
its collective attention to the next incoming class, and sophomores felt
abandoned and invisible. But there wasn’t much research on it other than Molly
Schaller’s qualitative research on the developmental processes of sophomores.
So, at the behest of John Gardner and Mary Stuart Hunter when they were with
the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in
Transition, I created a survey to better understand what the sophomore year had
been like for students. From that initial process, we refined the instrument so
that it was a reliable, valid indicator of thriving in the sophomore year and
was shorter and easier to administer.
Because the main purpose
of the SES is to assess sophomore thriving and what elements of the campus
experience in the second year have contributed significantly to that thriving,
we administer the instrument each spring. The results are intended for the
institution to use to refine its sophomore programming and services for the
next year. Throughout my research on thriving, my primary goal has been to
provide actionable data for institutions to use in order to make the college
experience better for all students. Over the past decade, we’ve had about 50-60
institutions participate in the Sophomore Experiences Survey.
My Ph.D. is in community
psychology, so probably the theories that have most influenced my thinking have
emerged from positive psychology and its emphasis on flourishing and
well-being, as well as prevention theories and research on a psychological
sense of community. My work on thriving represents the intersection of these
psychological theories with the retention theories that also represent the
psychological perspective, such as John Bean and Shevawn Bogdan Eaton’s model.
Among student
development models or theories, I think I was most influenced by Alexander Astin’s
student involvement model, although he tended to focus on behaviors rather than
psychological engagement. The work on student engagement by George Kuh, Jillian
Kinzie, and others has also been part of that. Nancy Schlossberg’s transition
theory and Laura Rendón’s concept of validation were also foundational to my
work on thriving. Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecology model also influenced my thinking,
as he viewed student development as a constant interactive process between the
student and various levels of their environment or ecosystem.
I think the enrollment
challenges provide an even better reason to assess thriving: If we can
understand what it is about the college environment and campus experiences that
contributes most to thriving for all students, we can target
our time, energy, and resources to those experiences. Rather than focusing on
the individual student and their lack of readiness for college – or any other
deficit they may be perceived to have – we can focus on the institution. That
is, we have admitted these students, which communicates that we believe they
can succeed by investing their time and money with us, so now it is up to us to
create the kind of environment that can nurture and promote their academic,
interpersonal, and psychological engagement and well-being.
That’s why my research
and attention is on the institution: I want to encourage colleges and
universities to become places where students can thrive, where they can come
alive to their potential and be equipped to live a good life after college. So
what it takes to become a thriving campus is where my interests are currently.
That means exploring the systemic issues that affect institutions, as well: the
ways our policies and practices have been designed and particularly how a
dominantly white ideology influences our view of students and what we believe
success means, and what it takes for them to succeed.
The Thriving Quotient
has different versions for adult returning learners and for graduate students.
We also have a new version for community colleges. What we’ve found is that
what it means to thrive is the same,
regardless of the student population, but what it takes to
thrive differs among these populations. For instance, one of our major findings
from research on adult students is the role that family plays. When adult
learners feel supported by their families and feel that their college
experience is not having a negative impact on their families, they are much
more likely to thrive. Among graduate students, the major finding is that a
sense of community within their
program is what contributes most to their
thriving – not their connection to the university. So helping graduate faculty
and staff design their programs and pedagogy in ways that build community among
their students is one of the recommendations that emerge from that research.
In our
predictive models of student thriving, what is fascinating is that the usual
background characteristics that are often predictive of the typical student
success outcomes are not significantly predictive of their thriving. It is the
quality of the campus experiences that contributes most to the variation in
thriving. So when we view student success more holistically – and attend to the
degree to which we are creating a sense of community on campus – it also shifts
the focus to the institution and what we are doing to curate those experiences
that can lead to a sense of belonging and thriving.
As one
example, we know that students are most likely to thrive in an environment
where they feel a sense of belonging and ownership, and we also know that
faculty who are sensitive to the needs of diverse learners and bring multiple
perspectives into their curriculum and class discussion are pivotal to student
thriving. The only experience every student has in common is the classroom
experience, so applying those findings means that we will invest time and
energy and resources into working with faculty toward inclusive pedagogy and
validating interactions with students; we’ll teach them how to create a sense
of community in their classrooms through their pedagogical practices.
This
finding also speaks to the important role that residence life professionals
play in building a sense of community among residential students. It’s so
critical to student thriving. I think that’s one of the major things that has
changed post-COVID: Students need more direct assistance with the social skills
and community-building strategies that are needed in order to thrive.
We used both an
inductive and deductive process to develop the instrument, and much of our
research was mixed methods. For example, we began with a qualitative study of
students who were nominated by their peers and faculty as thriving in college.
We interviewed them about how they defined thriving and about the elements that
they considered vital to thriving. That was the inductive approach: building
the construct from the ground up as we listened to students who were perceived
by others to be thriving and who confirmed that they were indeed thriving.
Those themes that emerged were then compared to what we learned from a
deductive approach – that is, from a thorough review of the literature on
student success and particularly the psychosocial elements of success. We
didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we looked for all the constructs that had
an empirical connection to a wide variety of student success outcomes. One of
the criteria for inclusion was that the psychosocial construct had to be
malleable: that is, it could not be a personality trait that was typically
stable. It needed to be something amenable to intervention so that the actions
taken by students and educators could make a difference.
The original instrument had
198 items on it, items that were confirmed by the qualitative themes as well as
empirical (quantitative) findings connected to student success. We administered
that 198-item instrument to students at six different institutions, and we also
conducted focus groups at those six institutions to get feedback from students
about the item wording. We wanted to be sure that students understood the
question, and in many cases they gave us great ideas about how to reword the
items for greater clarity.
From those 198 items, we
then examined those that had a standard deviation of at least 1.0 (on a 6-point
scale) so we knew there was a modest variability in student responses (if there
is not much variability, there is no point in assessing it, as students’
experiences are pretty much the same). Then we correlated each item to the
total score on the instrument and kept those items that correlated at least .40
or greater. Then we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (maximum
likelihood with varimax rotation), which revealed the five components that
accounted for most of the variance, keeping only those items that loaded at
least .40 on a single factor and did not cross-load. This process left us with
39 items.
From there, we assessed
the reliability estimates of each of the five scales and removed any items that
reduced reliability. Then we brainstormed about what to call the scales. It
really was a collaborative process with my research team of Ph.D. students at
Azusa Pacific University that resulted in the labels of the scales: Engaged
Learning, Academic Determination, Diverse Citizenship, Social Connectedness,
and Positive Perspective.
Over the years, as we
collected data from thousands of college students, we continued to refine the
instrument through confirmatory factor analysis. That process has resulted in a
24-item instrument that is a reliable and valid indicator of student thriving
in college.
Housing and residence
life professionals are really experts at nurturing a sense of community. So
that’s where I would encourage them to continue to develop their talents. In
higher education, we often focus on a sense of belonging – which is vital – but
community psychologists remind us that belonging is only one component of a
psychological sense of community. There are three other components: a sense of
ownership, interdependence, and positive emotional connections with others. So,
in addition to all the good things that housing and res life pros are already
doing to build a sense of belonging, I would suggest three more.
First, build a sense of
ownership among residents through voice, contribution, and mattering. When
students feel they have had input into decisions or policies, they are more
likely to feel a sense of ownership that is part of a sense of community.
Helping students see what they can contribute to their residence and
communicating that they matter to the institution are also important aspects of
ownership.
Second, create
opportunities for students to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Interdependence is when students feel that not only are their needs being met
by the community but also that they can meet community members’ needs. When
students work together toward a goal that requires everyone, that builds a
sense of community.
Third, teach students
how to build positive emotional connections to others. I think COVID really
hampered students’ social skills development, so providing opportunities for
celebration and emotional connection, but also teaching students how to make
friends and manage conflict, is vital right now.
I think housing and res
life professionals can also help students understand that selective involvement
on campus contributes to their thriving. Rather than sending the message that frequency
is what matters – which feeds the FOMO (fear of missing out) beast – we can
send the message that it is the quality of the involvement that leads to
thriving. Matthew Vetter’s research has confirmed
that involvement in fewer carefully selected activities that fit students’
interests, hobbies, or academic/life goals is far better than a surface-level
involvement in lots of different activities and organizations. Selective
involvement allows a student to invest in a deeper quality of experience that
often can lead to leadership roles as well.
Brian Jaworski [vice president for student life and dean of students at Corban University] and I have also done some research in which he trained RAs to craft a residence life curriculum around student thriving. The RAs were taught how to build a sense of community among their residents, but also how to encourage selective involvement on campus and engagement with faculty. RAs were also taught how to have one-on-one conversations with residents about their strengths and how to apply them to the challenges of college life. We found that when the RAs were intentional with their residence life programming in these ways, their residents were significantly more likely to thrive. We had a control/comparison group of RAs, so that helped us be more confident of our results. That study has not yet been published, though.
I think there are a
couple of key ways that student affairs professionals can support academic
thriving. First, engaged learning is really about meaning-making and connecting
what you’re learning in class to other aspects of your life. The more we can
connect the curricular and the cocurricular student experiences – through
cohorts, learning communities, service-learning, and other opportunities that
provide natural real-life applications of ideas and concepts – the more engaged
students are likely to be in the learning process. Research also indicates that
teaching students mindfulness can help them engage more in the learning
process, as can teaching them to focus more on mastery than on performance
(grades). There are a lot of messages students get from us as educators and
from their peers that emphasize a utilitarian performance approach to learning
(do whatever it takes to get the grade) that is antithetical to engaged
learning and student thriving. Encouraging students toward deep learning by
creating experiences where they can connect intellectual ideas with real-life
challenges and helping them see the value of connecting more with their
professors are tangible ways of engaging students in the learning process.
The second
recommendation relates to academic determination, which is defined as investing
quality effort toward meaningful educational goals and being a self-regulated
learner who knows how to apply their strengths to academic tasks and
challenges. There are three things that can build academic determination, all
of which res life programming and interactions can influence. One is strengths
development, which I already mentioned briefly above. Helping students identify
and develop their strengths and specifically teaching them how to apply those
strengths to their academic experiences can contribute significantly to student
thriving. This process can happen through advising, coaching, res life
interactions, and peer mentoring. Secondly, teaching students to have a growth
mindset has a significant impact on their academic determination. We have found
that peer mentors can be instrumental in this process, as they can model a
growth mindset but can also communicate the importance of practice and effort
in their own success. Finally, teaching students to set realistic goals is part
of academic determination, and that can happen through peer mentoring,
advising, and coaching. Connecting that goal-setting process to their strengths
makes it even more powerful, as knowing one’s strengths provides a sense of
agency as well as some specific pathways for reaching one’s goals.
Probably the most common
change I’ve seen – and one of the most effective if done correctly – is
ensuring that the academic advising experience is consistently excellent and
takes a success coaching approach that helps students identify and develop their
strengths and think about their life goals and curates the entire student
experience with the student. So that means advisor selection and training are
really vital. The second change I’ve seen is that when campuses take seriously
their institutional responsibility for student thriving, there is a
collaborative engagement across divisions and disciplines. When academics and
student life work together toward the best interests of the student, fostering
learning in and out of the classroom, students are much more likely to feel
they belong and are able to thrive. This collaborative engagement often begins
by talking together about the data and what it means – and taking the time to
disaggregate that data and compare the experiences of various student
populations on campus to ensure that all students have significant pathways to
thrive.
I think the most
important message I’d like to send readers is that student thriving is our
responsibility and that most of the experiences and interactions that lead to
thriving do not cost money. Building a sense of community on campus is the
number one pathway for student thriving, especially for students who have not
been well served by higher education, and student affairs professionals play a
pivotal role in that. Collaborative engagement is the hallmark of a thriving
campus, so when student affairs professionals can partner with faculty to build
community in and out of the classroom, students with minoritized identities
then have powerful pathways to thriving on campus – and all
students are able to thrive.
Dr. Sarah Gordon is the interim dean of research and graduate studies at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville and the editor of ACUHO-I’s The Journal of College and University Student Housing. For more information about The Thriving Project's survey process, visit ThrivingInCollege.org and register.