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Description

Learning communities provide environments and opportunities that create shared academic and co-curricular experiences for small cohorts of students. Many learning communities explore a common topic and/or common readings through the lenses of different disciplines. Some deliberately link “liberal arts” and “professional courses”; others feature service learning” (Kuh, 2008). Students in 1st year learning communities generally take a set of common, often core courses together as a cohort throughout the first year.

Benefits for Students

“Learning communities are the pedagogical embodiment of the belief that teaching and learning are relational processes, involving co-creating knowledge through relationships among students, between students and teachers, and through the environment in which these relationships operate” (Price, 2005). Learning communities often include components and practices that can enrich student learning, for example: interdisciplinary curriculum, active learning opportunities, and increased student-student and student-faculty interactions (Jaffee, 2008).

A variety of studies have found a range of positive outcomes associated with the participation in learning communities. In particular, LC participants:

• earn higher GPAs than non-LC participants and have higher retention and graduation rates (Baker & Pomerantz, 2001; Hotchkiss, Moore, & Pitts, 2006; Tinto, 2000; Hill & Woodward, 2013);
• report higher levels of satisfaction with college experience (Zhao & Kuh, 2004);
• have higher levels of academic self-confidence (MacPhee, Farro, & Canetto, 2013);
• are overall, more academically engaged (Pike, Kuh,& McCormick 2011; Rocconi, 2011);
• experience improvements in their motivation and cognitive development, including academic self-regulation, STEM professional/science identity, metacognition, and self-efficacy (Carrino and Gerace, 2016; Stefanou & Salisbury-Glennon, 2002);
• experience positive impacts on attitudes toward diversity and interactions with diverse students after participating in a multicultural LC (Firmin, Warner, Firmin, Johnson, & Firebaugh, 2013).

Additionally, it has been found that effective learning communities can decrease faculty isolation and increase curricular integration (Lenning and Ebbers, 1999).

Things to be aware of

When students “opt-in” to Learning Communities, Jaffee and colleagues warn against the risks of homophily (the greater likelihood that people with similar traits, attributes, and characteristics will associate [more] with one another than with others) which may recreate a “high school”-like environment and behaviors or “groupthink” dynamics; and that the primary group formation occurring in LCs may lead to more adversarial relations between groups of students and faculty members (Jaffee, 2008).

Critical components

Although, as described above, participation in learning communities is associated with a wide-range positive outcomes, experimental studies investigating the impact of specific components of learning communities have not been widely published.

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