Student Experience in the Research University (SERU)

Project Summary

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The SERU Project aims to develop new data and research on the factors and conditions that affect how students make use of the opportunity to attend a major research university. The intent is to both bolster scholarly inquiry into the student experience, and to investigate and promote methods to improve that experience.

Despite that fact that the promoting the maturation and knowledge level of students is a major purpose for the existence of universities, there are few systematic approaches for illuminating the their experience. The SERU Project seeks to gain a better understanding the ways students vary amongst themselves and over time in their motivations, perspectives and practices, and how these variations are related to students’ social backgrounds, pre-college experience, and future goals, and how these are affected by their experience within the university—in the classroom, through their relations with peers, and through their use of institutional resources.

Basing the project at the Center (an organized research unit) provides a location that can meet institutional research needs of the UC system and its campuses, and also ensures a strong scholarly approach to investigating the nuances of the student experience. It is this linking of institutional needs and scholarly research that makes the SERU project a unique and potentially broadly influential project.

To be effective in these goals, SERU is a long-term project that incorporates a longitudinal approach to deciphering the great variety of student experiences built around a census survey: the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES).

First administered in Spring 2002, UCUES is the only census survey designed as a longitudinal resource on the student experience in research universities. The survey sent to over 150,000 provides a UCwide benchmark as the University enters a dramatic period of enrollment and demographic growth, and as campuses incorporate potentially significant changes in instructional technologies and other teaching and learning innovations.

The objective of the SERU Project, and UCUES, is twofold: one, to develop new data that can assist policy development and improve the undergraduate experience; and two, to help create a new resource to promote scholarly research and reflection in this field. More broadly, the University of California, with its eight and soon to be nine undergraduate campuses, is viewed as a large laboratory for investigating the changing nature of undergraduate education in the American research university. UCUES data and analysis are used in Program Review and Campus Accreditation processes at UC, in reviews of UC Admissions Criteria, and in reports to the UC Board of Regents, State Lawmakers, administrators, faculty, and current and prospective students.

Core funding and in-kind support is provided by the University of California Office of the President, and the undergraduate campuses of the University.

A. Why SERU is Important and Timely

The undergraduate experience at major universities has been the focus of tremendous criticism and discussion over the last several decades. Changes in the academic culture of institutions related to transformations in academic disciplines, demographic changes, increases in student to faculty ratios particularly at public colleges and universities—these and other factors have deeply influenced the experience of students.

Past and Current Research Efforts

Despite these changes, analytical efforts to understand the undergraduate experience have been quite limited. Not since the 1960s and the early 1970s has there been a coherent academic effort to assess the actual experience of students. In the wake of large-scale expansion of the University of California and student protests, the study of student culture was at its height. Currently, although undergraduates on each of the University of California campuses are surveyed frequently, these surveys are not a part of a coordinated UCwide or coherent intellectual or academic effort.

Contemporary student research at the institutional level at UC and other colleges and universities is aimed primarily at providing data for assessment of institutional functions, or to answer relatively specific questions about aspects of students’ behavior, satisfaction, and achievement. We have a paucity of systematic data about the ways students today perceive and experience the academic demands, intellectual claims and opportunities the University provides, and about the norms students themselves construct and how these shape their uses of the University.

Existing national surveys have very limited ability to examine the variation in undergraduate experiences within an institution. Most efforts to gain information from students about their experience also tend to lack a qualitative component, and systematic longitudinal research designs are rarely implemented. Most student research efforts have only limited access to existing student databases essential for understanding the ways in which the differing backgrounds of students affects their orientation and experience at college.

Moreover, a growing proliferation of uncoordinated local and external student surveys, described as "survey anarchy" by one director of campus institutional research, makes it increasingly difficult for institutional research offices to induce students to complete "yet another" survey.

SERU and the University of California as a Laboratory

In contrast to current student research enterprises, SERU offers a research design that:

• Utilizes a UCwide on-line survey that can target tens of thousands of students across the UC system.
• Integrates students’ survey responses with existing institutional data relating to their social and academic backgrounds as well as their academic outcomes over time.
• Includes both a quantitative and qualitative research design.
• Examines systematically how students change over time.
• Provides the means for finely grained comparative analysis of student experience, satisfaction, engagement and achievement.
• Brings coherence and focus to the collection and dissemination of policy-relevant student data.

The power of this systematic approach could be dramatic in both influencing policy at UC and other universities and colleges, and in reviving the interest of scholars in the undergraduate experience. The SERU project views the University of California with its eight and soon to be nine general campuses as a large laboratory to investigate the changing nature of undergraduate education in the American research university.

The SERU project is an initiative that is collaborative with administrative units, yet based at an academic research unit that combines an interest in both policy analysis and scholarship. This collaboration is important for both promoting institutional knowledge on the undergraduate experience, and for creating and integrating creative scholarship that asks difficult yet important questions. The research design for SERU draws on academic research to inform and expand the ambitions of the University in improving the undergraduate experience.

Elevating the importance of SERU is the fact the UC will grow dramatically in enrollment and in its demographic diversity. With its undergraduate population tied overwhelmingly to California residence, UC is already the most demographically diverse university in the nation. Enrollment growth will mean further diversity, in race, economic background, and social class. It will also result in the opening of a new UC campus in Merced by 2004—the first since the campuses at Irvine and Santa Cruz were developed in the early 1960s.

B. Four Major Study Domains

The SERU team has defined four policy research areas on which to focus the content of UCUES and to bolster policy research. These include:

UC Student Academic Engagement

If the primary educational goal of the university is to maximize students’ intellectual development through the formal curriculum and wide range of experience outside the formal curriculum, what are the ways in which this goal is actually being fulfilled? How well do our recruitment and admissions practices succeed in constructing a student body that uses the opportunities for such development? What features of students’ preparation, motivation and prior socialization affect their engagement? What features of their experience—with faculty, with peers and in relation to institutional conditions and services—affect academic engagement and intellectual growth? What features of their experience work against such engagement? How do students change with respect to academic engagement during their student careers? What are the determinants of such change? How do students’ peer relationships and memberships (in subcultures, organized extracurricular activity, etc.) affect engagement?

UC Student Civic Engagement

There is much concern in many quarters about Americans’ responsibility and involvement as citizens and members of a common culture. The mandate of the University includes the nurturing of future citizens and community leaders. How do students vary in their awareness and participation in local (campus and community), national and global affairs? How can we account for such variation? To what extent and in what ways is such engagement affected by their undergraduate experience in the curriculum and in the extra-curricular life of the campus?

Pedagogy and Instructional Technology

Instructional technologies (IT) hold great promise for influencing the teaching methods and goals of faculty. However, there is little analytical information available on the extent of the contemporary use of IT in the curriculum and its character, and how students use it and perceive its importance in the undergraduate experience. An extremely important question is the extent of student expectations, and their sense of the effectiveness of IT. As IT grows in its use in the classroom, or possibly as a model of managing enrollment growth, the University will benefit from the creation of a longitudinal approach to understanding its impact, and for analyzing how effectively to promote its use. At the same time, a variety of other pedagogical approaches are experienced by students. To what extent do students have opportunities for involvement in research, in independent study, in small group discussion and collaboration, in internships—and what are the effects of such involvement?

Institutional Academic Policies and Practices

How can we better define the nature of student-faculty relationships in the contemporary research university? How do students’ experiences and perspectives affect academic progress and outcomes (persistence, successful choice of major, time to degree, transition to career and graduate school)? How is student engagement and experience affected by expanded enrollment and growth? What variations in experience, engagement and outcome are associated with different paths to UC admission (e.g., Eligibility in the Local Context, Dual Admissions)? How are variations in race/ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and other demographic factors related to variation in experience and engagement? How do variations in the use of the variety of institutional agencies aimed at helping students affect their experience?