Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030440077
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

An Overview of the Corpus

A brief, high-level overview of the corpus of studies reviewed in this chapter provides context for the more detailed discussions that focus on how researchers studied academic learning to come. The set of criteria described above yielded a corpus of 67 studies, nearly evenly divided between studies conducted in 4-year colleges and universities (32 articles) and in community colleges (35 articles). While my search might have inadvertently omitted some studies of academic learning that met the criteria I established, the corpus can be assumed to be largely representative of studies of undergraduate academic learning using at least one performance-based measure in the selected higher education journals. Most of the patterns I identified would not substantially change with the addition of a few more articles.

A prime example is the pattern in the distribution of articles: the two community college journals published more studies that met the inclusion criteria than the five higher education journals combined. Distinctive patterns arise based within this distribution as well. Of the 32 articles in the 4-year study corpus, 22 articles, or two-thirds of the corpus, utilized data from 1 of 2 large-scale studies of learning. Reflecting the time period for the review, a few studies utilized data from the National Survey of Student Learning (NSSL), but most were based on subsamples of data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNSLAE). These studies were conducted by a small group of researchers associated with one or both projects at different points in time. The corpus of community college studies is more varied in terms of authorship, conceptualization, and method. Studies in the 2-year corpus tend to be smaller in scale, often conducted at the course level, using both single- and multisite designs. A significant number were conducted by community college faculty members analyzing data from their own courses, programs, and/or colleges.

In the great majority of the studies in the 2-year corpus, researchers examined students’ learning of the particular subject matter knowledge and skills associated with specific courses or academic programs intended to build those knowledge and skill sets. A subset assessed the effectiveness of interventions or larger-scale curricular and instructional reforms designed to improve learning in specific programs, such as developmental education courses that serve as gateways or gatekeepers to associate’s degree programs and transfer. Even when comparing community college students’ learning in online, face-to-face, and hybrid courses, many researchers retained the focus on students’ learning of subject matter knowledge and skills (e.g., developmental writing, psychology, opticianry). In contrast, the 4-year study corpus included only four studies of academic learning in single discipline or field. Studies instead examined academic learning across many disciplines and, given the dominance of studies using NSSL and WNSLAE data, focused on a small number of transferable cognitive competencies. Specifically, of the 32 studies in the 4-year corpus, more than half (n = 17) focused on students’ critical thinking skills. The WNSLAE studies also often included two self-reported measures of students dispositions to learning: need for cognition (Cacioppo et al.

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