Abstract
This chapter’s authors conducted an online survey of two matched groups of Eastern Michigan University (EMU) students and former students. Surveying a cohort of Reacting to the Past (RTTP)-experienced students and EMU students with no RTTP exposure produced findings on student engagement with learning, civic engagement, choice of major, career preparation, and in the case of the RTTP group, information about the class taken, depth of learning, and which elements of RTTP students considered most valuable. The authors report surprising results regarding the comparisons on student performance, retention, and disruption of students’ perceptions of success.
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Notes
- 1.
We are grateful to Meng Chen and to Melissa Benson for their assistance in helping us with data collection on this project. We also very much appreciate those students who took our surveys, or participated in our focus groups, and in so doing helped us understand the impact of Reacting more than we did previously.
- 2.
Reacting is often used in what Kuh (2008) calls a “First Year Seminar and Experience ,” one of his high-impact practic es. It also could be considered an example of “Collaborative Assignments and Projects ” and “Diversity/Global Learning ”, two ot her high-impact practices.
- 3.
All our research was approved by the university’s Human Subjects Review Committee.
- 4.
The six-year federally defined graduation rate for the university has always been under 40%.
- 5.
Incoming students visit campus to register for their first classes on various dates in the spring before starting college; at this “Fast Track” day, groups of students are quickly registered for class, have their photo IDs made, and do other activities associated with beginning college.
- 6.
This was why we drew a larger sample for the control group, in hopes of achieving enough respondents for both groups to do data analysis.
- 7.
The students were offered pizza as compensation for their participation in the focus groups. They were also paid $15 at the beginning of the session.
- 8.
In our case, since Reacting was only launched in 2010, and accurate graduation rates cannot be determined for all but the earliest Reacting cohorts, we focus on credits earned rather than on graduation rates.
- 9.
For this variable, we considered anyone majoring in history , as well as any of the social studies-teaching programs, to be a history major (since virtually all social studies majors take a history-laden curriculum).
- 10.
The large number of cases in the dataset means that almost any relationship will be statistically significant, as, in fact, virtually all our relationships are. We leave it to the reader to determine, on a substantive basis, which of any relationships are large enough to warrant further consideration.
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Bernstein, J.L., Strasma, M.G., Olwell, R., Higbee, M.D. (2018). What Happens After Reacting? A Follow-Up Study of Past RTTP Participants at a Public Regional University. In: Watson, C., Hagood, T. (eds) Playing to Learn with Reacting to the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61747-3_8
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