Student retention is a growing concern at U.S. colleges and universities. Competition for tuition dollars is more intense than ever, and with increasingly diverse student populations, it's harder to come up with a single strategy to acclimate all students to college life.
Most programs seeking to boost retention focus on students' interaction with their external environments. But early experimentation with a new Gallup program called StrengthsQuest reveals that the process of looking inward and engaging in self-discovery may also help students adjust to college.
Do Freshman Seminars Help Students Acclimate?
Today's colleges are paying more attention to "first-year experience," using mentoring programs and seminars to ease the adjustment for incoming freshmen. In April 2000, 74% of U.S. colleges responding to a survey by the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition said they offer special classes for first-year students. Of those, about two-thirds said they provide "basic training" for freshmen -- helping them develop strategies to meet the practical, psychological, and academic demands of college. The other third provide offer more academically slanted classes.
Helping students academically adjust to college may not be enough to keep them there. Studies indicate that it's not necessarily the brightest students who are most likely to stay, but rather those who build strong connections with their environment.
Retention rates may also suffer because students are unprepared to engage in intensive learning. Many colleges and universities give students study strategies to help them take on an increased workload. But helping students understand what they're interested in, and what they're good at, also offers potential in this regard; it's only logical that students who can identify classes they'll find interesting will also be more likely to stay focused on them.
The Importance of Student Self-Discovery
Freshman seminars help students to gear up more quickly to take advantage of the college environment. But colleges and universities may be missing an opportunity if they don't also encourage introspection among new students.
Decades of Gallup research into human talent have shown that the greatest opportunities for personal growth and fulfillment lie in areas of natural talent, rather than in areas of weakness. To raise people's awareness of their own talents -- defined by Gallup as naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied -- Gallup developed an online assessment tool called StrengthsFinder, which consists of a 30- to 40-minute questionnaire that yields each person's top five areas of talent -- their "Signature Themes." As a follow-up to the assessment, Gallup teaches people to develop strengths -- the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity -- by refining their talents with skills and knowledge.
StrengthsQuest is an extension of this tool, geared specifically for students aged 16 to 24. Along with their Signature Themes, students are provided with insights and strategies based on their theme profiles, and given access to an online community of other StrengthsQuest users. Results from an experimental intervention with a case study of 212 freshmen and sophomores in an educational psychology class at UCLA indicate that this kind of strengths-based development program has the potential both to help engage students in college life and significantly benefit their long-term educational and career development.
In early 2002, Gallup conducted a "self-reflection" survey both before and after the UCLA students completed the StrengthsQuest program. The differences between the sets of responses were analyzed to determine if the responses pertaining to several key factors had significantly changed. The analysis suggested that after participating in the StrengthsQuest program, students had increased desire to learn more about, and develop, their own talents and strengths and those of others. Gallup also discovered significant increases in self-confidence and sense of direction, two qualities that lie at the heart of freshman seminar objectives.
Key Points
Given the highly competitive and quickly evolving nature of postsecondary education, retention concerns are bound to grow, and engaging students will probably become more difficult. For example, online distance-learning currently encompasses about 350,000 U.S. students and is growing 40% annually*. Online education expert Steven Jackson says as many as half of those students are 18- to 25-year-olds. He also notes that, though there has been little research on retention rates among this group, conventional wisdom would suggest that online degree programs may have higher dropout rates than those in conventional classroom settings.
In either an online environment or a physical one, introspection-focused tools such as StrengthsQuest may help engage students in their education and consequently boost retention. Early testing of the instrument suggests that one way to prepare students to learn more about the world around them is to have them start learning more about themselves. This especially resonates with one student who participated in the program:
"I think learning my strengths gives me much more confidence and hope for myself. I am able to be optimistic about what my future holds for me -- that there's more to life than what I see right now in college."
For more information on Gallup's StrengthsQuest program, contact us.
*Online distance-learning data from Eduventures, a Boston-based research firm.