Co-published with 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. To establish a stronger, more unified basis for designing and delivering effective LLCs, the authors of Living-Learning Communities that Work collaborated on the development of a comprehensive empirical framework for achieving the integrating potential of LLCs. This framework is designed to help practitioners guide the design, delivery, and assessment of LLCs. This book thoughtfully combines research and field-tested practice to document the essential components for best practices in living learning communities and presents them as a clear blueprint - the LLC best practices model - for LLC design. Practitioners, researchers, and institutional leaders can use the book as a guide to more effectively allocate resources to create and sustain LLCs and to realize the potential of these communities to improve undergraduate education.
Peer mentors in learning communities for first-year students aid new students in their transition to college. However, little is known about how these peer mentors address concerning student ...behaviors, particularly those that may suggest a psychiatric/psychological disability. This research addressed the issue by asking peer mentors how they were trained and how they attended to concerning behaviors in their learning community groups. Findings from this qualitative study, based on individual interviews with 11 peer mentors in one learning community, centered around the impact of peer mentor training on the mentors, their role in observing and addressing behaviors, and their observations about the ways learning community students responded to peers demonstrating concerning behaviors. Recommendations for the use and training of peer mentors are identified.
Many college students choose or need to work, and academic libraries offer a potentially convenient on-campus location for employment. Students serving in these roles may benefit from the experience ...both academically and socially. By examining students' experience as workers in the library, academic libraries have the opportunity to understand the benefits that such work might provide and intentionally plan to enhance learning and demonstrate library value in a novel way. This basic qualitative study sought to explore the experiences of student assistants working in an academic library and identify the benefits and challenges they perceived as a result of enacting the role. Individual interviews were conducted with seven undergraduate student library assistants at a doctoral-granting institution to determine benefits and challenges they noted that resulted from their experiences in this student employment role, and findings reveal opportunities for academic librarians in training and supervising student employees.
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