The broader aims of the study were to assess living-learning community experiences impacts on students’ socio-academic adjustment, in particular, in comparison to students not participating in living-learning communities. A core aspect of the project was to examine the racial microaggressions that occur at university, which may harm students’ socio-academic adjustment, and to examine the role of learning communities.
To achieve these goals and to implement the project, the researcher worked together with the Learning Communities at the University of Michigan (MLCs). The MLCs work together as a unit—each with distinguishing programmatic topics and features. The MLCs had been engaged in an ongoing effort to self-study their communities with the goal to administer two surveys in the academic year 2022-2023. As such, the goals of the project were aligned with those of the MLCs to allow for greater impact:
- Developing students’ sense of belonging and community within individual MLCs and across U-M’s campus including opportunities for students to develop significant friendships.
- Facilitating connections between students’ curricular and co-curricular interests and goals that foster personal, professional, and academic exploration.
- Connecting students to a strong network of peers, faculty, staff, alumni, and campus resources both as a transition to college life and throughout their college experience.
- Providing opportunities for students to engage in leadership practice, identity development, critical thinking, experiential learning, and applied learning.
- Fostering a long-term commitment to meaningful civic engagement and positive change.
- Supporting lived experiences of students across social identities and encouraging student engagement in exploring structures of inequality, power, and privilege.
With these revitalized objectives, the study hoped to learn about students’ own experiences and perspectives on life in their residence hall, with questions about themselves, their college experiences, and their residence hall. However, different from what was originally intended, the project does not include the assessment of on-campus experiences that could be identified as negative (such as microaggressions).
Through co-creation with the MLCs and using validated scales, implementation of the project was a success as the data from this project is directly usable to the MLCs with the hope to improve current and future students’ experiences in residence halls on campus.
Preliminary analysis of the survey data showed that the students in the MLCs differed in important ways from the students in the non-MLCs on key outcomes of the study, including a greater sense of social belonging, higher education identity commitment, greater other-group orientation, greater social identity exploration, greater critical consciousness, greater civic engagement, and greater positive affect. Literature suggests that each of these are positively linked to greater academic success and adjustment to college. The study tentatively concludes that learning communities have a positive impact on students’ social, cultural, and educational development in college.
