Higher Education Residential Learning Communities: What Are the Implications for Student Success?

The Russell Scholars Program is a residential learning community at the University of Southern Maine designed to serve a population of students who are motivated to learn by collaboration with faculty and other students. This pilot program was evaluated during the inaugural year to determine how the program affected student satisfaction and learning, and what program elements contributed to student success. An experimental design was used to study the program which included a control group. Students in the program were more satisfied with the University and retention was higher for students who were part of this learning community. It appears that learning communities within higher education may be instrumental in enhancing the college experience. Introduction The debate quietly continues among practitioners and theorists alike regarding the denotative definition of a learning community, requiring some consensus before discussing the assessment of the inaugural year of the University of Southern Maine's learning community, the Russell Scholars Program. Perhaps the most common definition of a learning community derives from the work of Alexander Meiklejohn (Meiklejohn, 1932) which favored a deliberately restructured curriculum to meet the educational objectives of a specific cohort of students and their faculty. Meiklejohn also saw the curricular structure of the learning community as a mitigating influence upon further fragmentation of curriculum and community within the institution (Miller, 1998, p. 44). John Dewey espoused collaborative learning that "would foster community and poise the teacher as more of a facilitator within a group of learners than merely as an outside authority" (Dewey, 1933, p. 59). In the late 1960's, Joseph Tussman professed the efficacy of formatting undergraduate curricula within programs that would unite faculty and students in distinct communities (Tussman, 1969). Modern learning community reform attempts to remove structural barriers endemic to many colleges and universities that often impede effective teaching and learning (Gabelnick, McGregor, Matthews, and Smith, 1990). From this focus on removal of such barriers have evolved many learning community models, some of which serve exclusively first-year students and emphasize collaboration in freshmen interest groups or FIGS (Tinto, Goodsell-Love, and Russo, 1993). Some of these models often include student-faculty interaction and interdisciplinary linkage (Levine and Tompkins, 1996) enhanced through active classroom learning (Angelo, 1993). More venerable, institutionalized models include sovereign four-year-degree-granting colleges such as Alverno College, or embedded, autonomous colleges such as Residential College at the University of Michigan. Except for the granting of degrees, the Russell Scholars Program falls into the "all of the above" category. The Russell Scholars Program Description Mission The Russell Scholars Program (RSP) is a pilot residential learning community designed to serve an initial group of fifty undergraduates, growing in annual increments of forty to fifty, to a full complement of three-hundred over five years. Russell Scholars is designed to serve good-to-excellent students who wish to pursue their studies in a small residential learning community, and who desire regular counseling in mastery skills in critical thinking, developing a commitment to learning, a tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to transfer competence, an intercultural facility, a personal and ethical integrity, and an ability to work as a team. Rationale The roots of the Russell Scholars Program lie in the belief among many USM faculty that there exists at USM a substantial population of undergraduates whose academic success and ultimate retention can be significantly enhanced by a residential, interdisciplinary, outcomes-based academic experience distinguished by its emphasis on intensive mentoring and peer support as described by Tinto, Goodsell, and Russo, (1993). …