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Midlands Voices: 'Learning communities' benefit college studentsOp-EdPresident Gregory Geoffroy Appeared in Omaha World-Herald Jan. 11, 2002 Attending college was once viewed as a kind of "rite of passage" - some students would succeed, but many would not. However, educators today take a very different view. We believe that the success of our students is the most important measure of our effectiveness. To succeed, students must remain in college. The more who stay enrolled, the more will graduate. When we see something that dramatically and positively affects the rate at which students persist in their studies, we get excited. That happened with a relatively new approach to student life and learning at Iowa State called learning communities. Most students who leave a higher education institution before graduation do so not because of grades but for other reasons, mostly personal. Some are beyond a university's ability to control. One that is very much within a university's control is how much a student feels a part of the institution. Learning communities are based on the idea that students, especially freshmen, will bond with the larger university community more rapidly and more successfully if that bond is created first with a smaller group and in a more personal setting. Most learning communities are organized according to a particular academic major. Others are organized around a common goal, such as women pursuing careers in science and engineering. Still others are organized around a particular area of interest, such as multicultural or international issues. Each one has something its members see as a common bond, meaning each member immediately has a support group. The idea of grouping students in smaller learning clusters is not new. Only in the past five or six years, however, has it begun catching on at larger colleges and universities. Iowa State was one of the early adopters of this idea, and our experience has been extremely positive. By 1997, more than a dozen learning communities had been organized, and in 1998 the university launched a large-scale learning-community initiative that involved 1,080 freshmen (nearly 30 percent of the freshman class) in 23 different learning communities. We now have three years of data on the 1998 freshman class, and the results are both exciting and instructive. President's homepage |
Office of the President, 1750 Beardshear Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011 (515) 294-2042, president@iastate.edu Ames, Iowa 50011, (515) 294-4111 Published by: University Relations, online@iastate.edu Copyright 1995-2002, Iowa State University. All rights reserved. |