Metaphors for the Student Experience

Exploring Metaphors for the Student Experience:??

Thoughts on Enriching Retention Research and Outcomes Assessment

David Kalsbeek????????[email protected]?

In “The Real World of College” by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner (2022, MIT Press),?we are treated to a candid and provocative look into the student experience from the students’ point of view.?From thousands of interviews over many years, the authors offer a portrait of the college experience that is not filtered through canned student surveys but rather enveloped in rich verbatim insights from students as well as other college personnel.??Drawing contrasts and similarities between the perspectives of different kinds of students at different kinds of colleges, as well as between students, faculty, trustees and others, the impressions and insights crystallize what we’ve perhaps always known but never fully appreciated about the student experience. ?Because I was among those they interviewed when DePaul University participated in their study, I have eagerly awaited this book….and I’m not disappointed.???

Reading it prompted me to revisit some of my thoughts on the assessment of the student experience via students’ metaphors ?-?which I offer here:

Assessing the Student Experience

In the wake of the pandemic’s impact on the entirety of the student experience at colleges and universities, there is naturally heightened sensitivity among college leaders to how we assess and come to understand that experience – and do so in ways that render an authentic appreciation for how that experience is seen through the eyes of students themselves.

But while that experience has been altered by COVID, there’s really nothing new about the value of such assessments.?For years this kind of effort has been driven by several forces: ?

·???????Over 30 years ago, when the student outcomes assessment movement was in its heyday and spurred by the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE), a provocative paper in 1989 by thought-leader Pat Hutchins entitled “Behind Outcomes” called for educators to prioritize, among other things, the systematic assessment of the student experience as part of a comprehensive approach to getting ‘behind’ outcomes and understanding the factors leading to them.

?·???????Similarly, while pressures to improve student retention and degree completion outcomes have intensified in recent years, the systematic assessment of the student experience has long been marbled throughout the retention literature and been a routine part of the retention research agenda on most college campuses.?

·???????Third, in response to the ever-rising fever pitch about brand marketing and competitive positioning, college leaders have come to appreciate the importance of assessing the student experience to gauge how that experience syncs with the institution’s ‘brand promise’ and to define the most distinctive features of the student experience that comprise the college’s value proposition.

Whether to help make sense of and improve learning outcomes, or to improve retention outcomes, or as part of market research, the disciplined assessment of the student experience has long been and remains a necessary and valuable undertaking.

Many survey instruments to do just that have come into common practice, including The College Student Experiences Questionnaire (CSEQ) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), as just two examples. Such instruments – and countless campus-developed survey projects - are designed to collect descriptive and evaluative data from students about their self-reported activities in and out of the classroom, learning experiences, quality of effort, student-faculty interactions, and so on.???

These student surveys gather a lot of valuable data, but don’t readily allow a discovery of how students make sense of the entirety of their experience. ???Surveys provide valuable quantitative specificity and allow important statistical comparisons with national norms and correlations with other outcomes, but often fall short in capturing a genuine sense of how students make meaning of the experiences they describe and evaluate.???Therein is the value of Fishman and Gardner’s qualitative approach, and of the taxonomy of ‘mental models’ distilled from their interview data.?

Another angle:?Exploring the Metaphors Students Use

The classic book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lackoff and Johnson (1980; Univ of Chicago Press) introduced many of us to the power of metaphor in how we make meaning of new experiences in our lives.?Through metaphors, we use past experiences and familiarities to make sense of things with which we are not familiar. ?Metaphors draw parallels between two unalike things in a figurative or non-literal manner and in doing so bring attention to certain similarities.???Metaphors are part of the natural cognitive process that shapes how we think and act and make meaning. ??

And this prompts the question:?What can we learn by having students describe their college experience in terms of the metaphors that capture how they view that experience? ??Do students make meaning of their personal college experience and the value of that experience for them in terms of its similarity with things more familiar to them? ????

A number of years ago, I set out to explore that line of inquiry in a small pilot research project.?Through a series of personal interviews and focus groups, we listened carefully as students would often describe their experience metaphorically.???These metaphors just emerged naturally in our conversations – and so we began over time to intentionally seek them out.???

Here are a few examples of the metaphors (typically expressed as similes, which are a kind of metaphor) students used to describe their college experience, with an illustrative verbatim quote and some interpretation of the student experience we felt was captured by that imagery.?????

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It’s like an assembly line.

Greg:??I’m a commuter and work 30-40 hours a week.?I don’t have time for extracurricular activities.?I come to campus, go to class,?get information,?and get out with a degree – like an assembly line”.?

For some, the college experience is one where they enter as raw material, get formed and fitted through a production line before they emerge as standardized, certified outputs.?It suggests a process where all students are treated identically, with little individualization, and are passive participants in a highly structured process.

It’s like a country club.

Beth:??I belong to a sorority and in the spring everyone is outside and there are things happening on the quad, and everyone is friendly and having fun –it’s like a country club.??

For some, the college experience is like a highly selective, high status environment where social functions are central.?It’s a haven from pressures and demands of the working world, more supportive than challenging, more social than academic, with extensive personal services and a high price tag.

It's like an escalator.

Robin:???it’s like an escalator, because you step on, take the classes you need, each year getting closer to your goal until you finally reach the top.?It’s more than a staircase you climb because friends and faculty help you along and make it easier.

For some, the college experience supports and transports them to a new level (e.g. careers,?knowledge mastery, social status,?professional certification);?it’s a nearly automatic process for advancement to a desired destination.??

It’s like a filling station.

Carolyn:??“I drive here,?pull in, fill my head with facts, pay my money.?That’s not negative – just utilitarian”.

For some, the college experience is one where they come to campus, tank up with knowledge, and move on. There’s little involvement in anything beyond the classroom as the student acquires the utilitarian resource they pay for and move on.??

It’s like a maze.

Chris:?It’s all so confusing and no one seems to know what’s going on or where to go to get something done.?It’s so disorganized,?there’s so little information and what there is is inaccurate most of the time.???Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze pulled around by a piece of cheese.?

For some, the college experience is one filled by obstacles and barriers to reaching their desired objectives.?Rewards hopefully await those who persist in negotiating and navigating it, without a map and without much support, despite dead-ends and sidetracks.

It’s like a shopping center.

Denise:??There are so many ways to turn, so many things to choose from, and you just pick out what you want to buy.?Like even though I’m a nursing major, I can take computer science courses or anything else that interests me and it’s all right here; a nursing college wouldn’t offer all those opportunities.?

For some, the college experience makes available a great number and variety of discrete benefits, services, opportunities or resources that they can conveniently access all in one place and under one roof.??Students can browse and explore among countless options or pursue one particular thing of interest.

It’s like a smorgasbord.??

Paula:???There are so many different kinds of people with diverse backgrounds, interests, and talents. And there’s something for everybody – it’s like a smorgasbord where you can take advantage of everything as much as you want.?And you can change your mind – I came here has a physics major and then changed to social sciences and the university can accommodate that.?

While a shopping center provides variety, a smorgasbord offers abundance -- limitless options to sample from at an ‘all you can eat for one price” buffet of opportunity.??It’s ideal for the ravenous – and abundance exists in courses, activities, relationships.

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These are just some of imageries of the student experience that students shared with us in this project.?Each student made meaning of that experience by comparing it with something completely different – yet the same in certain ways.???While all these students were enrolled at the same university at the same time, each drew different metaphorical parallels for their particular experience. ?We felt we had richer insight into their lived experience as they shared the metaphors they use to describe it.??One simple inquiry often told us more about that student’s experience than volumes of tables of statistical analyses of quantitative data from survey research.??

But quantitative analysis does allow us to explore the prevalence and preference of certain imageries across different groups of students. ???Toward that end, following the qualitative discovery through personal interviews and focus groups, we presented a number of such metaphors in a quantitative survey of students, asking them to choose the one that best captured their college experience.??This allowed for subsequent analysis of patterns and differences between types of students in their preferred choice of metaphorical descriptors of their experience. ?

In this pilot project, for example, we began to see that: ?

·???????Older students were more likely than younger students to choose an escalator imagery and less likely to choose shopping center.

·???????Freshmen were more likely than Seniors to see their college experience as a smorgasbord.

·???????Students who were employed while enrolled (for 20+ hours/week) were more likely than those not employed to choose maze.

·???????Commuter students were more likely than residential students to choose filling station

·???????Students who aspired to a graduate degree were more likely to choose escalator than those aspiring to only a bachelors’ degree.?

·???????Students undecided about their major were more likely to choose maze while Business students were the least likely to choose maze.?Arts and Science students were the most likely to choose shopping center.??

All of these patterns naturally made intuitive sense to us, given our general familiarity with the differences in experience between types of students.???Seeing the intuitively obvious differences manifested in these survey data provided valuable affirmation and validation of our assumptions – and demonstrated the relevance of this approach to understanding the student experience.

The next natural questions of course are:??does this kind of insight into the nature of the student experience help us better understand certain outcomes – be they learning outcomes or retention outcomes??Certainly each metaphor describes different levels of student engagement and different levels of institutional affinity --- which we know are powerful factors contributing to learning and retention outcomes.?Are students for whom the experience seems like an escalator more likely to graduate in a timely way than those for whom it’s like a shopping center - or a maze???When the experience is viewed as a smorgasbord, are students more likely to double major or be more active in multiple co-curricular activities – or perhaps take longer to graduate????

Our initial exploration of the metaphors students use to describe their experience did not extend to these kinds of further exploration of outcomes. ?I wish it had. But there is no doubt that this approach to understanding the actual student experience offered clues and avenues for a richer assessment effort.??It helped crystallize our thinking and conjecture about institutional expectations and the congruence of our assumptions with the students’ lived reality.????????

For example, do those whose college experience seems like a filling station miss out on valuable out-of-class experiential learning opportunities??What if they enrolled expecting a smorgasbord – and therefore feel the college is reneging on the brand promise? ?On the other hand, ?if a filling station experience is what some students prefer or need, do we do them a disservice by expecting or requiring something to the contrary (and charging additional fees for it)? ????Why does the experience feel like a maze particularly for those still deciding on a major – and is their higher attrition perhaps due to frustrating and unnavigable processes? ?

Whether a campus is engaged in the assessment of the student experience as part of studying learning outcomes, or of factors contributing to retention and completion outcomes, or of defining a college’s brand promise, turning to the insights offered by Fischman and Gardner and employing their interview method may have value.??Extending that to explore the metaphors students use to make meaning of the totality of their experience is well worth considering.???

Contact:?David Kalsbeek

[email protected]