Research Guides: High-Impact Educational Practices: Learning Communities

Learning Communities

The key goals for learning communities are to encourage integration of learning across courses and to involve students with “big questions” that matter beyond the classroom. Students take two or more linked courses as a group and work closely with one another and with their professors. Many learning communities explore a common topic and/or common readings through the lenses of different disciplines. Some deliberately link “liberal arts” and “professional courses”; others feature service learning.

Learning Communities by Faith Gabelnick; Jean MacGregor; Roberta Matthews; Barbara Leigh Smith
ISBN: 0787910368
Publication Date: 2004-09-08
Learning Communities is a groundbreaking book that shows how learning communities (LCs) can be a flexible and effective approach to enhancing student learning, promoting curricular coherence, and revitalizing faculty. Written by Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick¾acclaimed national leaders in the learning communities movement¾this important book provides the historical, conceptual, and philosophical context for LCs and clearly demonstrates that they can be a key element in institutional transformation.

The Learning Community Experience In Higher Education : High-Impact Practice For Student Retention Susan Mary Paige, 2017
Offering an interdisciplinary qualitative approach, this book examines and evaluates the role and benefits of a Learning Community (LC), a high-impact practice for student retention in higher education. Grounded in in-depth case studies and first-person student experiences, the authors studied four student cohorts (sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate students) who participated in a full immersion LC experience at an urban public four-year college in New York. Focusing on the maturity students develop as they progress toward their degrees, the authors evaluate the impact of the learning community on the students’ experiences, perceptions, successes and obstacles. A powerful demonstration of the effects of connection and comradery on learning, this account explores how the LC helps the decision-making of those in higher education administration regarding high impact student interventions.
Living-Learning Communities That Work: A Research-Based Model for Design, Delivery, and Assessment Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas, 2018
In 2007, the American Association of Colleges and Universities named learning communities a high-impact practice because of the potential of these communities to provide coherence to and ultimately improve undergraduate education. Institutional leaders have demonstrated a commitment to providing LLCs, but they currently do so primarily with anecdotal information to guide their work. As a result, there is substantial variation in organizational structure, collaboration, academic and social environments, programmatic integration, student outcomes, and overall quality related to LLC participation.
The Power of Academic Learning Communities
Kingsborough Community College's Intensive ESL Program, a collaborative, interdisciplinary program was designed to help entering ESL students acquire proficiency in academic English while at the same time succeeding in credit bearing college courses. Finds that students who become part of an active, student-centered learning community have a greater change of succeeding in college than those who do not. Explores the nature and structure of learning community programs and what makes them so effective in contributing to the success of entering college students, English-as-a-second-language (ESL) and non-ESL alike.

SU Learning Communities
The Office of Learning Communities is a partnership between Academic Affairs and the Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience...and as such reports through two distinct areas, the Office of the Associate Provost (Academic Affairs) and the Office of Residence Life (Division of Enrollment and the Student Experience).