Building Knowledge, Growing Capacity:
Global Learning Courses Show Promise
By Heather D. Wathington, assistant professor,
University of Virginia and evaluator, Shared Futures:
General Education for Global Learning, and Kevin Hovland,
director for global learning and curricular change,
AAC&U
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Dickinson College |
AAC&U's Shared Futures: General Education for Global
Learning project challenges colleges and universities
to more robustly infuse into curricular designs and
practices real-world global questions--with all their
complexity, multiple levels of interconnection and interdependence,
and inherent moral and ethical implications. Participating
campus teams are designing general education courses
and curricula that provide clear pathways along which
students develop the skills, knowledge, and attitudes
needed to effectively and creatively address real-world
challenges and opportunities. Campuses sometimes refer
to these bundles of learning outcomes as educating for
"global citizenship."
To effectively educate for global citizenship, one
needs to emphasize the ways that identity is shaped
by varied relations to power and privilege, both within
a multicultural U.S. democracy and within an interconnected
and unequal world. In other words, global learning can
engage all students--in all their multiple diversities--with
the critical questions: What does it mean to be a responsible
citizen in today's global context? And how should one
act in the face of large unsolved global problems? As
students engage with these and other questions, measures
of student identity and development are useful tools
for making curricular decisions to maximize learning
outcomes.
To measure how global learning opportunities might
change the ways students think about civic and social
responsibility in a global context, we worked with Shared
Futures campus team leaders to adapt a survey used in
an earlier AAC&U project, Liberal Education and
Global Citizenship: The Arts of Democracy. The Global
Learning Survey includes pre- and post-course surveys
to gather five types of data: demographic information,
information about precollege experiences, social cognitive
measures, citizenship/democracy measures, and global/science
connections measures. The surveys assess whether students
enrolled in seventy project courses at fourteen institutions
changed over the course of a semester.
Student Learning Outcomes
Students enrolled in project courses showed a number
of promising changes across a range of indicators. These
included:
- Attributional complexity: a psychological
construct that describes the degree to which an individual
is interested in understanding the causes of others'
behavior and the ability to consider different possible
causes (Fletcher et al. 1986). Students at ten of
the fourteen institutions had positive increases in
this measure; changes at six institutions were statistically
significant.
- Multicultural competency awareness: the
amount of knowledge that one reports possessing about
one's own culture and the cultures of others, as well
as general racial awareness. Students across all institutions
exhibited statistically significant increases in multicultural
competency awareness.
- Pluralistic orientation: the extent
to which students approach the world willing to engage
and learn about diversity (Engberg, Meader, and Hurtado
2003). Students across institutions showed mixed results
on the pluralistic orientation measure, although all
students taken together showed increases in pluralistic
orientation.
- Social self-confidence: the extent
to which students believe that they possess leadership
skills and the ability to negotiate effectively and
work cooperatively with others. Students across all
institutions showed a statistically significant increase
in social self-confidence.
- Social awareness: the extent to
which students believe it is important to be socially
and culturally aware. Students across all institutions
showed a statistically significant positive increase
in social awareness.
- Valuing social action: the extent
to which individuals appreciate the need to engage
in public action. Students across all institutions
exhibited statistically significant increases in valuing
social action.
- Low self-efficacy for social change: the
view that an individual is able to do little to make
a difference in society. Seven campuses showed decreases
on this measure, suggesting that students believe
that they can make a difference in society,
although these decreases were not all significant.
Four institutions, however, showed positive statistically
significant changes, suggesting that after the course,
students believed there was less they could
do to change society.
- Civic engagement: students' self-reported
civic behaviors since the course began. This change
was positively statistically significant across all
students and at six institutions.
- Speaking up and acting out: students'
political and social behaviors since the course began.
The measure of change was statistically significant
across all institutions with mixed results. Some institutions
showed slight positive increases; others showed slight
decreases.
Student Perceptions of the Course
In addition to measuring change since the course began,
the post-course survey also measured students' perceptions
of the course's impact on eleven further outcomes. Our
analysis combined these outcomes into three distinct
constructs.
Openness to Engagement included
items such as willingness to talk with diverse others,
openness to different views, and ability to see different
perspectives. Students were very likely to report
that these behaviors had changed since the course
began. The mean student response to this measure was
3.05 on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly
agree).
Interest in Current/Global Issues
included such items as "pay more attention to
global issues" and "show greater interest
in global affairs as a result of learning in the course."
Students were likely to report that they agreed with
these items. The mean student response to this measure
was 3.02 on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to
4 (strongly agree).
Making Science Connections included
measures such as "intend to learn more about
science and/or math so that I can work more effectively
for social change" and "have a greater understanding
of how science can have global implications."
Students were not likely to report that these behaviors
changed as a result of the course. The mean student
response to this measure was 2.46 on a scale from
1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). (Not
all courses had science components.)
Conclusion
What
does it mean to be a
responsible global citizen? |
| Students can
wrestle with this question in a wide variety of
courses and contexts. The seventy courses surveyed
included:
- Human Nature and the Christian Tradition (Otterbein
College)
- Cultural Diversity in U.S. Fiction
(Wheaton College)
- AIDS and Other Human Diseases
(Whittier College)
- The Uses and Abuses of Haiti
(Carnegie Mellon University)
- Study Abroad and Global Philadelphia
(Arcadia University)
- Fundamental Organic Chemistry
(Chandler-Gilbert Community College)
|
Previous research suggests that student experience
with diverse others sets the stage for a host of social,
cognitive, and democratic outcomes (Engberg, Meader,
and Hurtado 2003). The work described here suggests
that a similar process can occur in courses designed
to engage students with complex questions of global
identity and responsibility. Students participating
in the redesigned courses reported statistically significant
gains in active learning, multicultural competence,
social self-confidence, civic engagement, and active
political awareness—all within the context of one
semester. These findings are encouraging evidence that
courses featuring questions of global interdependence
and engagement have some effect on students' attitudes
and dispositions. The study also suggests that connections
exist between students' social self-confidence, their
desire to be politically and civically active, their
view of their own multicultural awareness, and whether
they view themselves as critical thinkers.
While evidence derived from these student surveys is
encouraging, it remains only suggestive of a deeper
picture of student learning in need of illumination.
Shared Futures institutions are also building assessments
into their general education designs and embedding them
within course assignments. In this way, they are creating
milestone assessments across the curriculum so that
students can learn "to gauge their progress against
high expectations for their most advanced work"
and best examples of global learning (Association of
American Colleges and Universities 2004, 11). Examples
of assignments and student work will be made available
in early 2009 on the Shared Futures AAC&U Web site
(www.aacu.org/SharedFutures/).
References
Association of American Colleges and Universities.
2004. Our students' best work. Washington,
D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Engberg, M., E. Meader, and S. Hurtado. 2003. Developing
a pluralistic orientation: A comparison of ethnic minority
and white college students. Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Educational Research Association,
Chicago.
Fletcher, G. J. O., P. Danilovics, G. Fernandez, D.
Peterson, and G. D. Reeder. 1986. Attributional complexity:
An individual differences measure. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 51: 875-884.
