Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MOCC (Microaggressions on College Campuses) Reporting period: 2021-12-01 to 2023-11-30 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project 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. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far To begin with, a partnership with the MLCs was established which involved bi-weekly meetings to streamline the shared goals and to co-create the survey with the MLCs. This was needed to ensure that the survey met the needs of the MLCs to have immediate impact on MLC programming.The survey was then programmed in the online survey platform Qualtrics, which required several iterations, and was done in consultation with the MLCs. The project was then submitted for IRB approval and was deemed exempt from ongoing IRB. The online survey was pilot-tested by a group of six U-M undergraduate students who participated in an MLC the year before.All research participants received a link to the survey. The non-MLC students received the link via email; the MLCs mostly administered the survey to their own students through in-person community group meetings where students sat together and filled out the survey on their own computer.As soon as data collection was finished, the data were cleaned using IBM SPSS Software and syntaxes to keep a record of the changes made to the raw data. This cleaning process took about a month to complete. Data were also analyzed using the same software tool with syntaxes kept in file.Finally, brief reports were written based on survey data focusing on key elements that all MLCs were interested in, which was discussed during the group meetings. In other words, these reports were tailored to the needs of the MLCs to allow for greater impact and usability. Through this way of disseminating the study’s findings, the MLCs could evaluate their own MLC and how they compare to non-MLCs, which was a vital component of their self-study. The reports were kept brief and were written in such a way that they were easily understandable to practitioners by using clear sentences in a non-technical way and summarizing the data using visuals.The reports show that students in MLCs perform better on key study outcomes compared to students in non-MLCs. In particular, students in MLCs are more committed to their field of study, have greater sense of social belonging, are more inclined to interact and socialize with other social identity groups, are more equity-minded by reflecting critically on social injustices and more motivated to change those injustices and to take action, have stronger beliefs to be involved in their communities and act on this belief, are more satisfied with their current social life, and generally feel better about themselves in terms of their moods and personal feelings. Note that the reports are based on preliminary analyses as only global means were compared, without considering the nested data structure (students nested in MLCs). Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) The MLCs provide robust support for first-year students entering and engaging with campus life. Indebted to the Pilot Program’s original vision of living-learning communities back in 1962, the MLCs bring together the academic and residential experiences of students as they live together and focus on a chosen academic topic or theme. MLCs offer successful leadership opportunities while providing focused learning and development in the MLC area of expertise. In previous academic years, the MLCs have defined collective learning goals and reshaped/refined a shared vision and values to effectively narrate the MLC story and inform the MLC visioning, practices, and partnerships. Moreover, while the MLCs have achieved national prominence for innovations, the wish is to build on that success to renew and revitalize these high-impact programs. With these new (preliminary) evaluation results the MLCs do appear to have a strong program in place, that can be used to shape future practices, and revitalize the importance of the MLCs to the larger university community, and create a community where all MLCs are growing in the same direction. While the evaluation of MLCs is a case study, the study showcases a promising way to assess living-learning community experiences impacts on students' transition from high school to college elsewhere. Project overview and timeline
