Abstract
We investigated whether students in psychology-based learning communities (LCs; i.e., cohorts who took introductory psychology and English together) performed better on psychology tests than those in standard classes. There were two types of LC; in one (connected LC), we created links between English and psychology by using English class readings that related to the social psychology unit, and by requiring students to produce interdisciplinary group podcasts. In the other (unconnected LC), there were no interdisciplinary connections. Students in the connected LC had higher mean test scores in psychology than both students in unconnected LCs and those in standard classes. Our results suggest that students perform better on psychology tests when efforts are made to consolidate information through interdisciplinary links in an LC.
First-year undergraduate learning communities (LCs) are relatively commonplace in 2-year and 4-year colleges throughout the United States, and most aim to facilitate a successful transition to college and to increase student retention (Barefoot, 2002; Lichtenstein, 2005). They exist in many different formats, but can be broadly defined as programs designed to build a sense of community within a group of learners. Most are based on a linked course model (Kellog, 1999), wherein a cohort of students co-enroll in two or more classes together. However, despite their increasing popularity, LCs only serve about half of the first-year students in the colleges that run these programs (Barefoot, 2002). This may be due, in part, to financial constraints but also could be attributable to the relatively high demands of LC teaching on faculty in terms of time, effort, and willingness to collaborate across disciplines. Nevertheless, the impetus for increasing enrollment in these programs at many institutions continues to grow.
LC models recommend building connections between the two courses to provide a more integrative and enriched learning experience (Kellog, 1999; Tinto, 2000); however, LCs may often fall short of their stated goals (Nownes & Stebleton, 2011). Several studies have suggested that LC professors frequently fail to communicate adequately (Lichtenstein, 2005; Soldner, Lee, & Duby, 1999), but this is rarely taken into consideration when assessing the efficacy of LCs on student learning (though see Lichtenstein, 2005).
Regardless of the level of interdisciplinary coordination, students in LCs spend a considerable amount of time together, which may help to promote a sense of community with their peers. Indeed, LC students frequently report feeling more socially connected to and supported by their LC peers and faculty (Andrade, 2007; Crissman, 2001; Kellog, 1999; Soldner et al., 1999; Tinto, 2000; Zhao & Kuh, 2004), and research shows that students with strong peer support are more likely to “bond” with, and persist at their institutions (Kellog, 1999; Tinto, 2000). It has also been suggested that peer bonding within LCs may help to increase student motivation (Stefanou & Salisbury-Glennon, 2002) and promote a culture of collaborative active learning (Bielaczyc & Collins, 1999; Smith, MacGregor, Matthews, & Gabelnick, 2004; Tinto, 2000; Zhao & Kuh, 2004), both of which may help to promote deeper, more transferrable learning. However, there is a lack of evidence-based support for the idea that LC students outperform students in standard classes.
Andrade (2007) reviewed 12 LC studies in 4-year colleges and showed that in general, LC students were more likely to persist at college than other students, but she was unable to make a conclusive argument for the academic benefits of LCs because individual studies assessed academic performance in different ways, and some used only self-reported grades. Zhao and Kuh (2004) collected self-reported survey data from students in 365 4-year colleges, and found that when they controlled for ACT and SAT scores, first-year LC students did not report higher grades than their non-LC peers. Lichtenstein (2005) also suggested that peer bonding alone in LCs may not be enough to boost learning to a measurable degree. Lichtenstein compared institutionally reported cumulative grade point averages (GPAs) for 229 students across 11 different LCs at the same college. She found that students with positive perceptions of their LC, in terms of the recognizable links between courses, strong faculty collaboration, and good peer bonding, had better first-semester and second-semester GPAs than those who bonded well with their LC peers but felt their LC lacked interdisciplinary cohesiveness and visible faculty interaction. Lichtenstein also showed that only students with very positive perceptions of their LC had higher retention levels than non-LC students.
Over the past few years, increasing numbers of faculty at our institution (a 4-year urban commuter college) have developed and taught first-year LCs to help students adjust to their first semester in college. In these LCs, a cohort of students co-enrolls in a content-based course (e.g., introductory psychology) and a course that is commonly considered to be more skills based, like English composition. Although there are many theoretical benefits to LCs, there is a paucity of rigorous published research that demonstrates whether LCs increase learning, especially in 4-year senior colleges. Thus, the focus of this study was to investigate whether students in psychology-based LCs (i.e., introductory psychology paired with first-year English composition) performed better in their psychology classes than students in standard classes and whether the level of interdisciplinary connections in LC classes influenced learning.
In this study, the same psychology professor taught all psychology classes (LCs and standard). The professor evaluated whether each LC had met the three suggested institutional requirements of fostering better relationships (both among students and between students and faculty), active faculty communication and interaction both before and during the LC semester, and the inclusion of assignments and discussions on common topics. Based on these evaluations, we classified one LC section as a connected LC (with active faculty collaboration and curricular coordination) and the other LC sections as unconnected LCs (with little faculty collaboration or interdisciplinary connection, possibly reflecting the lack of experience of coordinating coursework across disciplines or the relative lack of on-campus availability of adjunct English faculty).
From a practical standpoint, the lack of collaboration and interdisciplinary coordination in the unconnected LCs allowed us to evaluate whether these are key features for enhancing LC student learning. We used a common assessment of academic performance across psychology classes (psychology test scores). Because we believed that peer bonding was likely to promote more collaborative learning in the LCs, we hypothesized that test scores in all LC classes would be higher than those in standard classes. In addition, we assumed that curricular coordination would promote better learning, so we hypothesized that test scores in the connected LC would be higher than those in the unconnected LC, particularly on those concepts for which we had created strong cocurricular links in the connected LC.
Method
Participants
We used archival data (2007–2010) to assess the psychology test scores of 155 first-semester college students enrolled in one of the three different class types of introductory psychology at a 4-year urban commuter college with the same professor. Seventy-four of the students enrolled in psychology-based LCs (introductory psychology paired with first-year English composition), and the remaining 81 students took psychology and English separately in standard classes. We further subdivided the LCs into connected or unconnected depending on the level of interdisciplinary connections between English and psychology as shown in Table 1. Although the same psychology professor taught all psychology courses, each LC section (two unconnected and one connected) had a different English instructor, and students in the standard class group (three psychology sections) were enrolled in any one of the 41 standard English sections.
Psychology Textbooks, Course Sequences, and Level of Interdisciplinary Integration for the Three Different Class Types.
Note. LCs = learning communities.
Kassin, S. (2005). Psychology in modules (John Jay edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Huffman, K. (2010). Psychology in action (9th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
LC Structures
As summarized in Table 1, there were several differences between the three class types. However, as all LC students spent two adjacent class periods (psychology and English) with the same group of peers, we considered each LC section to be a “community” of learners.
In the connected LC, the professors met extensively before the beginning of the semester to plan how to increase the interdisciplinary connections. To help achieve this goal, we resequenced the connected LC psychology course so that social psychology unit was in the first part of the semester and used a number of complementary English class readings that focused on issues of stereotypes and prejudice throughout the semester (see Table 2). Starting in the second week of the semester, students worked together in English to produce group podcasts that portrayed a main theme of a student-selected book through a psychological lens (see Table 3 for details).
Psychology Topics and Supporting Materials in the Connected LC English Class.
Note. LCs = learning communities.
aThese two books also connected to the brain and behavior unit.
Key Features of the Podcast Assignment in the Connected Learning Communities (LCs).
During the semester, the two professors in the connected LC communicated frequently via e-mail and in person about the progress of students in the class and to decide when the psychology professor was needed in the English classroom for the podcast assignment. These professors taught in the same classroom and frequently used the time (10 min) between classes to summarize lesson plans for that day. In the unconnected LC, the English and psychology courses were relatively independent; the two classes were held in adjacent periods but in different classrooms and the professors did not communicate frequently.
Materials and Procedure
We assessed academic performance using the only common assessment that was used across all psychology classes: psychology test scores. All students took four noncumulative multiple-choice tests in psychology over the semester; because the psychology materials were taught in a slightly different order in each class, we used the mean test score as the dependent variable. The test content was very similar across classes and there was no grade curving.
At the end of the semester, LC students anonymously and voluntarily completed an institutional questionnaire using a 5-point Likert-type scale to indicate to what extent they agreed with statements describing their LC experience. The First-Year Experience (FYE) Office provided us with the survey results showing the percentage of students who agreed with these statements; agree and strongly agree responses were collapsed. We focused on the results of 2 items that were common to all LC surveys: (a) “Working collaboratively with peers created a positive learning environment” and (b) “I formed friendships in the LC which I expect to maintain after the semester.”
We obtained the SAT scores from the institutional records maintained by the FYE Office in order to ensure that differences between the groups could not be explained by more basic differences in scholastic aptitude. The FYE Office also supplied English composition course grades. The SAT and English grade data are shown in Table 4.
Mean SAT Scores and Mean and Median English Grades for the Three Class Types.
Note. LCs = learning communities.
Five non-LC students withdrew from their English courses; these students are included in all other analyses.
Results
Prior to analysis, we examined data for violations of the assumptions underlying the analytic methods employed and identified outliers using the median absolute deviation method described by Wilcox (2005). Seven participants (two from unconnected LC group and five from standard group) were excluded because their SAT scores were determined to be outliers based on their median absolute deviations (Wilcox, 2005). We applied an arcsine transformation to the psychology test scores, but for ease of interpretation, we have also reported descriptive statistics using the raw test scores.
The SAT scores of the three groups (Table 4) did not differ significantly, F(2, 145) = 2.33, p = .11, η p 2 = .03. However, considering the high degree of variability in the SAT scores and the relatively small sample size, after confirming that data met assumptions for homogeneity of regression and variance, we conducted an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) on the transformed psychology test scores. We used class type (connected LC, unconnected LC, standard) as the independent variable and entered the SAT score as a covariate. The ANCOVA showed that the effect of class type was significant F(2, 144) = 9.86, p < .001, η p 2 = .12. 1 Post hoc analyses, using a Bonferroni-corrected α of .017, revealed that students in the connected LC had significantly higher psychology test scores (M = 79.6, SD = 9.5) than both those in the unconnected LC (M = 73.9, SD = 8.6, d = 0.71) and those in standard classes (M = 69.4, SD = 10.5, d = 1.02). The psychology test scores of the unconnected LC and standard class groups were not significantly different. 2
Given that we used supplementary materials relating to prejudice and stereotypes in English classes to connect with social psychology concepts in the connected LC, we analyzed the percentage scores for the 7–9 test items that related to prejudice and stereotypes for both LC groups. Because data deviated substantially from normal even after application of several common transformations, we conducted a nonparametric Mann–Whitney U test. The connected LC (Mdn = 100%) significantly outperformed the unconnected LC group (Mdn = 71.42%) on these items, U(n 1 = 45; n 2 = 24) = 293.5, p = .001, r = .37.
Similarly, English grades for all students were not normally distributed, even after applying common transformations, and the median grade for each of the three groups was the same (Mdn = 3.0). To establish that the number of high- and low-scoring students did not differ among class types, we conducted a χ2 test of independence for class type and English grade (three levels: A–B (3.0–4.0); B–C (2.0–2.9); C–F (0–1.9). The distribution of English grades across the groups did not differ significantly, χ2(4, N = 143) = 3.0, p = .55, Φc = .10.
Forty-five students from the unconnected LC and 22 students in the connected LC completed the survey. Surveys showed that most students (76.0% in the unconnected LC and 77.3% in the connected LC) felt that they had made friendships in the LC that would persist beyond their first semester. The majority of the LC students (70% in the unconnected LC and 86.4% in the connected LC) also agreed that peer collaboration created a positive learning environment in their LC. Fisher exact probability tests showed no significant differences between the survey responses of the two LC groups.
Discussion
As hypothesized, students in the connected LC scored higher than students in the other two groups on content-based psychology tests. Furthermore, students in the connected LC substantially outperformed the other LC students on test items relating to the social psychology topics that we also covered in the English class. However, contrary to our predictions, there was no significant difference in the test scores of the students in the unconnected LC and the standard class group. Our results are congruent with the findings of Lichtenstein (2005), who showed evidence of superior academic performance in students who perceived that their LC had strong interdisciplinary course connections and visible faculty collaboration than those in less well-connected LCs or standard classes. Both Lichtenstein’s study and ours underscore the importance of controlling for these factors when assessing the efficacy of LCs. These results are timely because they support our institution’s goal to encourage LC faculty to devote time and energy in coordinating content-based classes (e.g., in psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) with what are often considered to be more skill-based classes, such as first-year English composition. For our connected LC, increasing the linkage between the classes appears to have been an effective way to increase student learning and retention of psychology content. There was a substantial difference in the median test scores for individual items relating to prejudice and stereotypes between the two LC class types. In our connected LC, we talked about concepts, such as formation of stereotypes, internalized racism and stereotype threat, and motivational theories of prejudice in both English and psychology, which may have promoted greater memory consolidation for these materials. These results suggest that our future connected LCs might be even more effective if we are able to create interdisciplinary links for a greater proportion of the psychology course content. The challenge is how to do this effectively.
In the connected LC, although we created strong links between the social psychology topics and English, the social psychology items only constituted less than 5% of the total number of items and therefore cannot be the sole reason that the connected LC group still did better than the other two groups on the overall test scores. We believe that there are two plausible explanations for this. Students in the connected LC may have acquired and or remembered more information as a result of working on their podcast projects that targeted specific units of the psychology curriculum. However, it was difficult to assess this effectively, especially as the timing of the tests may have masked some of these effects. We conjecture that a more likely explanation is that better collaborative learning in the connected LC contributed to the overall test score difference between the two LC class types.
In general, we had speculated that students in both LC class types would have better relationships with their classmates in psychology and English than in their other classes. There are two major differences in class structures that are likely to contribute to this. LCs are smaller than most other standard introductory psychology classes in our college (24 students cf. 40–80 students) and LC students spend more time with the same cohort of students than do other students. Indeed, our survey results suggest that LCs help to build a sense of community as most students formed friendships in their LCs that they expected to last beyond the first semester. We also assumed that better peer relationships in LCs should facilitate learning. Anecdotally, we saw evidence of enhanced LC peer-led learning in the psychology classroom; LC discussions were livelier and went deeper than in the standard classes. Overall, we believe that the LC students were more likely than students in standard classes to socially construct psychology content knowledge by exchanging information and ideas with their peers (Vygotsky, 1978; Wells, 2000). In support of this, the majority of the LC students surveyed in our study believed that peer collaboration contributed to a positive learning environment. In the connected LC, we used the podcast assignment to deliberately foster student collaboration. However, collaborative learning may have also occurred spontaneously, but to a lesser extent, in the unconnected LC because some students formed study groups outside of class. We believe our results suggest that a formal requirement for collaboration within the course design is a more reliable way to ensure that effective peer-led learning occurs.
In conclusion, we believe that the extra effort that we had to put into teaching in the connected LC was more than worthwhile. Participation in the connected LC was a stimulating experience for students and faculty alike. Students had to work collaboratively with others, which is an important skill both in college and in the workforce. We felt that we got to know our students in this LC better than other students, and we felt that they had also made considerable learning gains over the course of the semester. We anticipate that future studies that track these students through college will provide evidence that will show that the benefits of the connected LCs are multifaceted and, as others have suggested (Andrade, 2007), will extend beyond the first-year experience.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.