ELLEN KURT ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
To provide information about students’ prior and current experiences with leadership and service, Wartburg is conducting the Multi-institutional Study of Leadership.
“By getting a sense of what they bring in, what they are currently experiencing and what are some possible outcomes, we can get a better sense on how we can best serve students,” Director of Institutional Research Fred Ribich said.
The questions help to discover what kinds of experiences, coursework and service-work students are engaged in while they are at Wartburg, and what students see as important outcomes of education, especially in developing their leadership qualities.
If the results of the survey would come back saying that Wartburg students do not perform as much service as the college thought they did, the college has some options they might use to encourage students to do service.
“We would want to explore our options in making the [service] opportunities more available to our students. That’s certainly another point of focus statement. Whether we would ever get to a point where, for example, we would consider requiring students to do service, I don’t know,” Ribich said.
One option some schools consider to help get students more involved around campus is a student engagement transcript which shows what students have participated in while they were undergraduates.
“There is a question of if it is important overall to a student’s education.
“Should the institution be recognizing this by providing essentially a transcript of extracurricular kinds of involvement? Down the road, that could be something that gets looked at,” Ribich said.
The college likes to use this kind of survey on a cyclical basis, every three or four years, so there is some kind of trend information to look at. Ribich says this survey will mostly be used again.
"At some point, particularly given that we may initiate some changes in programming and that sort of thing, we might want to monitor to what extent that has made any difference,” Ribich said.
The data is managed by the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs, an independent contractor performing the actual survey. It’ll be summarized into a report that will then be given to
Wartburg telling how students responded to the various questions along with the raw data file.
Ribich encourages all students to participate in this survey. If students did not participate this past week, they will have until Feb. 6 to complete it.
“Fifty percent of students participating is a challenging goal because there are a lot of schools that do these surveys, and they’re lucky to get 30 percent,” Ribich said, “But I think, our advantage is our student population is a little smaller and, frankly, I think our students are more conscientious and responsible than a lot of others,” he said. “So they follow through and that’s a good thing.”
When looking at the results of this survey down the road, Ribich said that it would be great if the college could take comfort that this is a good snapshot of our student population.
That’s the key thing, Ribich said, particularly when talking about what changes the college wants to make.
The college does not want to do things that are only going to impact a small percentage of students, they would like to impact all students favorably.