No description available.

This qualitative case study describes how first year students perceived the impact of living within a living learning community by giving voice to students who wished to not only describe their living experience, but also have this description heard. While living learning communities are not new to Residential Life departments on college campuses, the studies of such programs have predominantly been large scale quantitative studies conducted to assess the overall satisfaction that students feel with living in such a program or to ask one very specific question, typically related to drinking patterns or academic successes. Through the studying of one particular academic living learning community at a specific mid-Atlantic, urban university, I was able to delve deeper into the lives of students and develop a detailed holistic picture of the student experience specifically through the use of student interviews. My small sample, and immersion in the field, permitted an in depth understanding of all aspects of their residential and academic life related to their living learning community experience. The residents took advantage of the research as an opportunity to speak freely about issues that more macro researchers had not considered as potential impacts of student life within a living learning community. The research took place in one residential hall over an entire year. The data was gathered from a series of in-depth interviews and almost daily observations. Studying a select number of students within the community for a full academic year provided the opportunity to ask the same questions on numerous occasions and study how the students' responses changed or remained the same over time. This year long endeavor also permitted my immersion into the community and attendance at programs and events held within the living learning community allowing me to discover five themes relating to the student perspective of living learning communities: The Importance of Family, Social Activities as Opportunities to Bond, Accountability with Regards to Academics, Sense of Exclusivity, and the Importance of Personality on Perception of LLC Success. Through these themes, this study provides one of the few rigorous insights into life in a living learning community from the student perspective directly through the use of student voice, allowing for higher educational leaders and planners to take this individualized perspective into account in the organization, implementation, funding, and assessment of future living learning community endeavors. / Educational Administration

This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of living-learning communities on GPA and fall-to-fall retention rates for college freshmen at Regional University (RU). The specific focus of this study was the effect of these communities on students of different ethnic groups and on the potential of these communities to reduce the academic performance gap. RU was a small public university that offered both undergraduate and graduate degree programs. RU required all freshman students to live on campus in living-learning communities beginning with the 2007-2008 academic year. This study utilized the 343 student freshman cohort class of 2008 in the living-learning communities as the treatment group. This treatment group was compared against the 193 student freshman cohort class of 2008 living off campus and against the 643 student freshman cohort class of 2006 living on campus prior to the implementation of living-learning communities. In addition, the statistics were analyzed by ethnicity to examine the impact of these communities on White, Hispanic, African American, and Native American students and their ability to reduce the academic performance gap. The research revealed that the communities implemented at RU were not statistically significant at improving academic performance or at reducing the achievement gap. The results of this study were not consistent with the literature available on living-learning communities. Current research identifies six fundamental factors critical to the success of living-learning communities: positive working relationship between academic affairs and student affairs, involvement of faculty in the residence halls, appropriate funding, assessment strategies, university wide buy-in to implementing these communities, and commitment from institutional leadership. Examination of the inputs and processes on which these learning communities developed and operated indicated that the majority of these were not well developed to sustain these communities. The divergence of these findings from the literature may be attributed to key departures from the literature regarding the set-up and operation of these communities at RU.

No description available.

This study investigated the effect of the integrated learning environment fostered by Living-Learning Communities on students’ self-efficacy towards their social and academic transition to college at a large regional institution in the Southeast. Grounded in a theoretical framework guided by Schlossberg's Model for Analyzing Human Adaptation to Transition and Bandura's Triadic Reciprocal Determinism, a two-part structural equation model analysis was conducted with SkyFactor survey data from 427 first-year students. The first analysis, which compared outcomes for LLC participants with non-participants, demonstrated a small statistically significant positive effect for LLC-participants perception of their housing environment. Regardless of LLC participation, the general housing environment had a positive direct effect on students' perception of their social and academic transition to college. Furthermore, the perception of social transition had a greater effect on students’ academic transition as a mediating factor, when compared to the direct effect of the general housing environment. The second analysis, which only used data from LLC-participants, investigated the relationship between the LLC environment and perceived transition outcomes. The results showed the LLC environment did not have a statistically significant direct effect on students’ perception of their academic transition. However, the support fostered by LLCs had a relatively large and significant effect on social transition and an indirect positive effect on academic transition. Implications for program structure, student outcomes, methods to cultivate meaningful relationships for shared leadership, and future research are discussed.