The Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education
What is a liberal arts education? What does it mean to be liberally educated? How do key educational experiences, campus practices, innovations, and structures support liberal arts education? Through what kinds of experiences do college students achieve liberal arts outcomes? Do these experiences occur only at liberal arts colleges?
These questions are at the heart of a large-scale, mixed methods, national longitudinal study designed to investigate critical factors that affect liberal arts learning outcomes. Professor Patricia King at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) is heading up this study at the University of Michigan. This study will investigate the development of seven student learning outcomes associated with undergraduate liberal arts education. The selected outcomes include: integration of learning; inclination to inquire and lifelong learning; effective reasoning and problem solving; moral character; intercultural effectiveness; leadership; and well-being. In addition, this study aims to identify the educational conditions and experiences that foster the achievement of these outcomes. Thus, it will explore not only whether and how much students develop as a result of their collegiate experiences, but also why and how this development takes place. This combination of purposes is distinctive, as few studies have focused simultaneously on how student learning improves over several years, and on the key educational experiences that are reported to affect student learning and development.
For more detailed information on either the overall study or the quantitative portion of the study, please visit the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.
