ELLI, the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory, is a measure of students’ lifelong learning attributes: resilience, changing & learning, creativity, strategic awareness, learning relationships, critical curiosity, and meaning making. I’ve been working on this campus project with my students and other faculty since summer 2013. So far, we’ve gathered benchmarking data from our first-semester students and looked at the impact of teaching lifelong learning skills directly (in college reading, English, college success courses) and indirectly, using reflection and mindfulness practices in a human development and family studies course on coping with stress and personal development.
This semester, I’ll be collecting more benchmarking data from our students who have completed at least 90 credits – to compare these data with our first-year students. In previous projects, we compared student ELLI data pre- to post-semester to students in a control group who received no instruction in lifelong learning. In every case, students in the control group showed no statistically significant changes in their ELLI scores, while those in the intervention group did. I wanted to extrapolate this further to see if over time, our seniors would show any differences in ELLI scores to students in their first semester. This may take several years to gather enough data in the set for worthy comparisons, but we are making a start this year.
Project two is a continuation of the work with my students in college reading. Each year they take ELLI and make gains pre- to post- semester in every aspect of lifelong learning except resilience. I’ve tried various things to help make that score budge, but to no avail. So this semester, I am focusing very heavily on this aspect of lifelong learning in an attempt to identify strategies and approaches that can help students to grow stronger in this area.
