by Sarah Gordon
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.