ELLI Senior Benchmark Project gets Underway!

We’ve been using the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI) with students for many campus learning projects since 2013, and we’ve gotten some interesting and useful insights as a result. The most current (and perhaps final) project in the series is to gather lifelong learning scores for our seniors which we’ll use in a comparison with the first-year student benchmark scores from last year. This can be useful data for accreditation processes as well as campus improvement!

Effective LIfelong Learning Inventory

http://www.elli.global/

I think no one would argue that  helping students to acquire lifelong learning attributes is a worthwhile outcome of a college education. The big question is whether this happens simply by virtue of attending college, or if other interventions/approaches might be needed.

For example, in every project to date, students score lowest on resilience in ELLI. Even after weeks of instruction, it remains a recalcitrant trait!  The insight I am currently coming to is that when students keep the learning in the abstract, meaning simply as an idea, a factoid to study for an exam, but not as a concrete and lived application or reality, they really do not make gains. We’ve worked on practical strategies to build resilience, and I’ve had them reflect on real life challenges upon which to bring those strategies to bear. I wonder also, if they don’t yet see the changes that are happening for themselves… Time will tell. I have a new exercise called, “I Used to Think, Now I Think” (from Making Thinking Visible, Ritchart, Church, & Morrison, 2011) that  may help us get at a better realization of the changes that are happening for them.

My challenge from now until the end of the semester is to continue to encourage students to bring the learning out of their heads and apply it into their real-world experiences. We get one more shot at measuring at the end of the semester. I would love to see the needle shift!

 

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