Ronald L. Huesman

Gym Bags and Mortarboards: Is Use of Campus Recreation Facilities Related to Student Success?

This study examined the relationship of student use of campus recreation facilities (CRFs) with retention and graduation rates at a large, public, Midwestern Carnegie doctoral-extensive university. Tinto’s interactionalist theory of student departure provided the conceptual framework. An extensive review of the literature on the relationship between academic performance and recreation facility use identified a set of critical explanatory predictors. Although anecdotal evidence and studies of student perceptions support the contention that use of CRFs promotes social integration, thereby increasing the likelihood of persistence, few studies have employed both actual CRF visit counts to quantify use and advanced statistical methods to analyze the data. The linking of visitation data to individual student records is a unique component of this preliminary study. Maximum likelihood estimated models were used to identify which factors were related to retention and graduation. Results show positive associations between CRF usage and both first-year retention and 5-year graduation.

The impacts of mandatory service on students in service-learning classes.

ABSTRACT This naturalistic study examined differences in students’ motivations for elective versus required service-learning (SL) classes. Students in two successive academic years’ cohorts were surveyed by the SL center at a large Midwestern university. Analyses compared classes differing in requirements for community-based service. Students required to participate in community service as part of a class within a program required for admission to a university were less likely to: want to be involved in future community work; enroll in another SL class; and recommend their class, compared to other groups of students, including others from classes in which SL was required as part of the program in which students were enrolled. These findings suggest that students’ motivations to participate in community-engaged activities are not shaped simply by whether or not community engagement is required in SL classes, but also by other factors including how the engagement opportunity is contextualized.

Modeling the Influence of Service-Learning on Academic and Sociocultural Gains: Findings from a Multi-institutional Study

Data from the Community and Civic Engagement Module of the 2010 multi-institutional Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) survey were used to develop and test two structural equation models that estimated the potential direct and indirect effects of service-learning involvement on undergraduate students’ (n = 20,426) perceived gains in academic and sociocultural development. Service-learning was found to have a positive association with students’ citizenship/civic behaviors, both in- and out-of-class, but no statistically significant effect on students’ perceived gains in academic skills was found. The structural equation model also revealed statistically significant positive direct relationships between service-learning and student perceptions of sociocultural gains as well as between service-learning and students’ civic-oriented behaviors (both in- and out-of-class). Students’ citizenship and civic behaviors (both in- and out-of-class) were found to play a mediating role between service-learning and sociocultural outcomes.