Peer Leadership as an Emerging High-Impact Practice

Like many, my college years (interrupted by two years of missionary service) were transformative for me. Mars Hill University, the University of Utah, and Brigham Young University (yes, I transferred twice) were all tremendously impactful.
 By the time I had graduated I had new intellectual skills, had learned what it meant to be part of a diverse community, and had a much clearer idea of who I was and who I wanted to become (both vocationally and otherwise).  As with any kind of learning, there were a number of factors that contributed to my growth during this period, but my undergraduate experiences at

To be more specific, there were particular aspects of my experiences at these schools that were impactful.  At +Mars Hill, intercollegiate athletics helped me feel a sense of belonging and identity on campus, the common "Liberal Arts in Action" curriculum gave me a chance to reflect on and have conversations about big questions, and an internship in the Athletic Training department was my first taste of authentic experiential learning in the college setting.  I was only at "the U" for a semester, but it was impactful in that I figured out (a) that I really didn't want to be a doctor (thanks to 1,000 seat "weeder" classes in biology and chemistry) and (b) that I was really going to hate my college experience unless I found a way to really immerse myself in the experience, which was hard to do living at home with my parents.

Eventually I ended up at +BYU.  While I enjoyed many aspects of my BYU experience, it wasn't the classes I took (although I took some great ones) or my major (which I enjoyed immensely) that most influenced me during my three years on campus.  Instead, it was the two years I spent as a peer mentor in what was then known as "Freshman Academy."

More than any other experience I had as an undergraduate student, being a peer mentor met the criteria for high-impact practices put forth by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).  It provided me with meaningful interaction with faculty members, engaged me in critical thinking about important issues, provided me with undergraduate research opportunities, and taught me to work collaboratively with others on sustained projects.  In fact, in the recent alumni survey I completed, I cited it as the single most impactful aspect of my experience at BYU.  I say this because it made a more meaningful contribution to my realization of essential learning outcomes than any other part of my experience, and, more importantly, launched me on a career trajectory in higher education that I would never have imagined.

AAC&U has defined 10 discreet high-impact practices (HIPs) that are widely-tested and linked with substantial educational benefits:

• First-year seminars/experiences
• Common intellectual experiences
• Learning communities
• Writing-intensive courses
• Undergraduate research
• Collaborative assignments and projects
• Diversity and global learning
• Service and community-based learning
• Internships
• Capstone courses/projects

I'll argue, both here and hopefully at AAC&U's Centennial Annual Meeting next year, that peer leadership should be included on this list because of it's potential to contribute to 21st Century Learning outcomes and provide for a transformative undergraduate experience.  National studies of peer leadership point to this practice as an emerging HIP with potential to fulfill the promise of a liberal education (e.g. Keup, 2012).  Indeed, peer leadership promotes the hallmark outcomes that characterize liberal learning by integrating many of the characteristics of the more established HIPs llisted above.  

Yet, the quality of the PL experience varies across campuses.  But, when institutions merely cobble together sexy “best practices” rather than intentionally inter-weaving established HIPs to form a focused and intentional educational environment, the potential for the PL experience to yield substantial educational benefits is lost.  In contrast, when stakeholders thoughtfully integrate established HIPs into the PL experience, students are positioned for tremendous growth.

What are the characteristics of a high-impact peer leadership experience?

Close ties to the academic curriculum.  Peer leadership comes in a number of flavors, with peer leaders being used to support student athletes, first-generation students, and women in STEM.  And, at some level, any type of peer leader experience can be impactful.  But, peer leaders are likely to experience greater gains when their work is aligned with a credit-bearing course that is part of the required curriculum.  Required first-year seminars are a great setting for this type of peer leadership, but it could also take place in another substantial academic course that is a required part of the curriculum.  This alignment brings validity to their work, while also providing opportunities for peer leaders to engage with course content and pedagogies in ways that promote critical thinking.  Even better -- embed peer leaders as part of a learning community where peer leaders and students engage "big questions" and work to integrate their learning across courses.

Meaningful engagement with faculty members.  A big part of the reason I was changed by being a peer mentor was that it brought me into a situation where I was being mentored by full-time faculty members who were interested in my development and new how to challenge and support me.  Too often, peer leaders are hired or selected, provided with minimal sub-par "training," and then set loose to somehow figure out how to "lead" their peers.  In these cases, being a peer leader isn't likely to lead to much growth.  Worse--there's a decent chance it will do more harm than good.  Peer leaders should be provided with opportunities for regular and meaningful interactions with the faculty members who supervise them.  Even better -- engage peer leaders in research and assessment examining the impact of the peer leadership initiative of which they're a part.

Make it academic.  Peer leadership is often critiqued by those who view it as nothing more than taking students on campus tours during new student orientation or organizing weekend social events.  There isn't anything wrong with peer leadership experience that is firmly grounded in the social aspect of college; However, peer leadership that takes on a more "academic" tone, will both be viewed more favorably by the academic officials on campus, and contribute to the academic outcomes of the institution.  Whether it's substantial writing assignments or tasks completed by peer leaders, undergraduate research, capstone projects that invite peer leaders to integrate and articulate the learning they've experienced in their role, or an academic course that they register for as part of the experience, the peer leader experience needs to have some kind of connection to the academic life of the university.

Clear learning outcomes and focused assessment.  It isn't enough to just claim to be providing a great learning experience for peer leaders.  It needs to be directed by well-articulated learning outcomes and documented by high-quality assessment.  

High-impact peer leadership experiences are already happening on a number of campuses, but for peer leadership to really emerge as a truly high-impact practice, institutions need to approach it as such.  Considering the above issues will be a great start.

The day I found myself on Google Scholar

I have never considered myself a writer, a researcher, or an academic.  Although I do a lot of writing, have started to develop a research agenda, and am a doctoral candidate, none of the above labels have ever really come to mind when I think about myself and the work I do.  I still struggle to explain to family and friends what, exactly, it is that I do all day.

But, I feel slightly more academic today because I just found myself on Google Scholar.  I'm not the Bryce Bunting with a ball valve patent (he lives in Georgia and owns a manufacturing business--I know that, in part, because he emailed me once and introduced himself as the "other" Bryce Bunting.  Oddly enough, we are both from Utah), I'm the one that comes up a little down the list with an equally uninspiring entry for an academic paper ("Understanding the Dynamics of Peer Mentor Learning") published in the most recent special edition of the Journal of the First-Year Experience & Students in Transition.

The study explores what undergraduate peer mentors learn through their experiences mentoring first-year college students.  It's been a bit of a journey as well.  The data were collected in 2004, led to a conference presentation in 2005, a pretty shoddy draft of the article was written shortly thereafter, and the manuscript was rejected by a journal in 2009.  In 2010 we got serious about getting it published and started the hard work of revising the manuscript.  After about six months of work we submitted the article for publication in May of 2011.  In August we were asked to "revise & resubmit," which we did.  The article was then finally accepted for publication in December of 2011.  Three more revisions later I received my copy of the finished article just yesterday.  I never realized how much work goes into scholarly writing.  It's been an eye opening experience for me, but one (strangely enough) that I hope to have again.  I never thought I would be saying that, particularly when I graduated as a PE major six years ago.  

So, somehow, today I feel like I should be acting a little smarter and more scholarly to justify my existence on a search engine that uses the word scholar.

Answering tough (and meaningful) questions: A case for narrative inquiry in educational research

In a recent posting  on his blog, John Gardner raised some intriguing questions about measuring the impact of our work with first-year students (e.g. How do we measure whether or not students love their university experience?  How do we measure transformation?).  These are, no doubt, important questions for First-Year Experience professionals to ask.   And, if we see our work as more than just boosting retention stats, they are questions that we have to grapple with.

The trouble with questions about “love,” “transformation,” or “the impact of a mentor” is that these things are tough to measure.  Granted, researchers can operationalize concepts like love and develop instruments that measure proxy indicators that the more fuzzy concepts are present (e.g. we measure “engagement” by measuring a variety of indicators including time spent working outside of class, interactions with faculty members, study w/ peers, etc.), but this approach has its problems.  Before readers’ red-flags go up, this is not a rant against quantitative research or operationalism—this type of academic work has its place and helps us to answer critical questions about student experience.  However, while p-values, standard error estimates, and confidence intervals, are sometimes seen as the coin of the realm in academia, for some questions (i.e. those mentioned by John), particularly those with deep personal relevance for us, the traditional quantitative approach can leave us feeling unfulfilled, still questioning whether or not our work has really mattered in the lives of individual students. 

 The good news is that there are other research approaches coming to be recognized as just as viable as more traditional quantitative approaches.  One that may hold particular promise for FYE researchers is narrative inquiry.  A blog post is not the place to attempt an exhaustive explanation of this discipline; rather, my intent here is to provide a brief sketch outlining the general landscape of the field.  For those wanting more depth (and much more sophisticated) than is found here, these are some good places to start:

“Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry,” Educational Researcher, 19(5), 1990

Narrative methods for the human sciences, Catherine Riessman, 2007

Narrative Inquiry, Jean Clandinin & Michael Connelly, 2004

Touching Eternity:  The enduring outcomes of teaching, Tom Barone, 2001

 

Narrative inquiry is a sub-discipline within the broader field of qualitative research.  Based on the premise that storytelling is an inherent human quality and that we live “storied lives,” narrative researchers use narrative data sources (e.g. story-telling, journals, field notes, interviews) to study how we experience the world and then make meaning of these experiences.  As an example, John’s question about love for an institution could be addressed by interviewing graduating seniors, soliciting stories from sophomore students, or analyzing  journal writing from a freshman seminar course, then identifing meaningful themes that cut across the entire set of “data.”  Ultimately, the researcher would aim to use these narrative sources to construct a “meta-narrative” that tells an overarching story related to the initial research question. 

As with any research methodology, narrative inquiry has its critics.  Common criticisms of narrative inquiry include a lack of generalizability, reliability, and validity (similar to the arguments against most qualitative approaches) and these are all fair claims.  However, as a general rule, narrative inquirers don’t view these criteria as goals of their research.  Rather, their focus is on transferability, apparency, and verisimilitude.  To narrative researchers, the narrative approach is a way of addressing personal and human dimensions of experience in ways that quantitative data cannot—they are working from a completely different set of assumptions about research.  Jean Clandinin and Michael Connelly (arguably the most well-known and well-respected narrative researchers) put it best in their paper “Stories of experience and narrative inquiry” when they said that “stories stand between the general and the particular, mediating the generic demands of science with the personal, practical, concrete demands of living” (1990). 

Lest this post be viewed as a one-sided push for a problem-free research approach, it is important to recognize narrative’s dangers and pitfalls.  Because narrative asks researchers to construct stories from qualitative data, the possibility exists for individuals to fake the data and concoct pure fiction, based on nothing but unfounded assumptions and only anecdotal data.  Additionally, narrative could be used to misrepresent experience and promote deception.  Finally, some narrative researchers (particularly when stakes are high) may present only “Hollywood stories” where, for example, students love everything about their university experience, become deep learners, and are transformed by their college experience for the rest of their lives.  But, it bears mentioning, that similar claims could be made of virtually any approach to research, even quantitative methods.

While narrative inquiry may not have the tables and statistical significance that sways some political and campus leaders, there is rhetorical power in human stories that we can relate to and that elicit similar stories from our own experiences.  What’s more, narrative inquiry is gaining traction among educational researchers, as evidenced by the recently formed Narrative Research SIG within AERA, the convening of the first ever Narrative Inquiry conference this last May, and the well-respected work of Clandinin and Connelly.  Most importantly, narrative offers an approach for answering those questions, like John has posed, that are deeply meaningful to us personally, and whose answers we use to measure the impact of our careers.

 

General Education & the Problem of Fragmentation

On Monday morning I attended a half-day meeting on my campus where, among other things, we discussed the General Education program at BYU and how to measure students' achievement of our GE learning outcomes.  To help us prepare for the meeting, we were provided with a document that outlined each of the learning outcomes, their rationale, and how the institution plans to measure them.  

In reviewing the document, one thing that became painfully clear to me was that the only direct evidence of the achievement of GE outcomes we collect are course-specific (e.g. writing samples from advanced writing courses, course assignments/projects, etc.).  I'm not suggesting that these artifacts would not tell us anything about what students are learning, but there seem to be at least two problems with relying solely upon course-specific evidence.  First, it flies in the face of the underlying philosophy of general education, namely that it should provide a holistic and integrated experience for students that runs across particular courses.  Second, it assumes that integration of core concepts and learning outcomes will somehow occur without any intentional or strategic effort on the part of the institution (or, that faculty members are designing assignments that ask students to make connections across courses and between disciplines).  

What BYU--and I'm guessing a lot of other campuses--needs to consider is whether the GE program is an isolated and fragmented set of learning outcomes, each of which can be measured independently of the others, or whether we are after more holistic and integrated growth for our students.  If it's the latter, then portfolios, captstone experiences, learning communities with shared assignments, and assessment plans that examine student work that arises from these deep learning experiences will become much more important to us than they are currently.

What is success? And, how important are outcomes?

In my work I spend about 25% of my time supervising undergraduate peer mentors.  Peer mentors support students in their transition to the university, connect them with university resources, and become sounding boards for new college students as they learn how to learn.  Not suprisingly, these peer mentors are largely high-achieving, highly engaged students who do the sorts of deep learning that we wish happened for every college student.  

I meet with these peer mentors every other week to hear about their work with students, discuss challenges they face, and support them in their development.  One of the most frequent things I hear in these 30 minute conversations is "I'm not really sure if I'm making a difference" or "my students don't respond to me."  Essentially, the question these peer mentors ask is "Am I doing a good job?" and "How will I know?"

Those are fair questions, questions we have all likely asked at one point or another.  As a very young and very inexperienced high school soccer coach, I asked this question after almost every game we played (especially after losses).  Any time we lost I found myself in a dilemma:  I believed I was a good coach and that I worked hard to prepare my players for matches, so what did it mean when we lost?  Was the fact that the opposing team had scored one more goal that we did evidence that I wasn't successful?  These sorts of questions weighed more heavily on my mind when we lost 4 out of our last 5 games of the season after going undefeated up until that point.  Teachers face the same sorts of questions when they work hard to help students learn, but are then faced with test scores that are deemed unacceptable or below par.  

There was a time when I viewed teacher performance in very black and white terms:  If they can't get test scores up, then they don't deserve to be in the classroom.  I've softened my stance over the last couple of years and I'm not really sure anymore.  I don't know that I have a very good definition of what success is for teachers, peer mentors, or coaches.  My biggest question is how much attention we should pay to outcomes (i.e. test scores, pass rates, win-loss percentages, etc.).  There is definitely a place for measurment and assessment.  We live in a world that values numbers and percentages.  We like to count, sort, and rank things.  We believe that doing so gives us a basis to make accurate objective decsions about quality.  What's more, in an economy where resources are sparse, numbers matter a great deal.  But, when our work (and hearts) are wrapped up in helping human beings grow, learn, or change, a purely outcomes-based focus can be incredibly discouraging at those times when the people we work with "underperform."  

This post has really been a long and inarticulate way of asking how we can know when we're doing a good job as educators.  I still think that there are some key outcomes that we need to pay attention to, but some other possible indicators of success might be

1.  Effort, preparation, and thougtfulness.  While we can't control what learners do or how they respond to our invitations to grow, there are some important things that are in our control.  Preparation and intentionality seem to fit here.  Teachers and coaches should work tirelessly to be well prepared and to design learning experiences that meet learners where they are and that help move them towards meaningful learning goals.  

2.  Using feedback to improve.  While outcomes and measurements may not be the sole indicator of success, an educator has a responsibility to use feedback to refine the way they teach.  "Failure" (in the form of unsatisfactory outcomes) isn't failure if you use it to get better and change the way you do things.  

3.  Grit and persistence.  How we respond to challenges seems to be an important part of success.  While persistence in and of itself may not constitute success, there is a fair amount of evidence that the gritty, never-give-up attitude when sustained over time, does lead to success.  What' more, initial "failure" or low-performance provides nice opportunities for learning and reflection, and can be a foundation for eventual success (see this post on the virtue of being terrible, including painful footage of Charles Barkeley's golf swing).  

4.  Relationships.  I have always believed that learning is an inherently social pursuit and that relationships matter a great deal.  So, one indicator of an educator's success is the personal relationships they are cultivating with learners.  If a peer mentor has good relationships with their students (or even most of their students), I always take that as a sign that something useful is happening.  Likewise, the fact that my soccer players seemed to respect me and valued our relationship, gave me comfort after losses when I was questioning my value as a coach.  

As I finish this list I realize that this is touch-feely stuff.  I'm also willing to admit that there is danger in defining success in this way because of the slippery slope it can present (e.g. "Who cares if none of my students passed the class, they like me and I worked hard, so I am a success.").  So, how should we define success as educators?  And, how much attention should we pay to outcomes?

Measuring what matters: How much should we really care about retention?

In his February 2010 TED talk, CEO and author Chip Conley tells a fascinating story about the nation of Bhutan and their transformation from an isolated, undeveloped nation to a modern, technologically rich nation that still manages to maintain the essence of their original culture and traditions.  Bhutan's story is one of striking the balance between progress and innovation, while stilll maintaining core elements of an identity (a rare feat for any country, organization, or school in today's rapid-paced world).  One of the most interesting parts of Conlee's telling of the story is his reason for Bhutan's ability to transorm in these ways.  Quite simply, he believes that it is because Bhutan has learned to "count" the right thing, gross national happiness.  Forty years ago, Bhutan's King coined the term rather off-handedly to describe his commitment to building an economy that would allow for growth, while staying true to Bhutan's Buddhist roots.  Bhutanese officials ran with the concept, developed sophisticated instruments to measure the concept, and used it as a model for the development plan that brought Bhutan into the 21st century.  This all stands in stark contrast to most nations' preoccupation with Gross Domestic Product and their belief that it stands as the supreme indicator of a nation's well-being.

There seems to be a lesson for higher education in all of this, particularly the first-year experience movement.  Like anyone else, we count what is easily countable.  So, in many ways "retention" has become our GDP.  We work hard to measure it, argue over how it should be measured, showcase (or hide) it in reports to our administrations, and tout it at conferences.  This isn't to say that we shouldn't care about retention--the reality is that enrolled students bring money to the institution and that money keeps us running.  But, there seems to be some danger in retention becoming what Conlee describes as a "misplaced metric," an easy to count measure that gives little indication as to the real health of an institution.

So, what should we be counting?  In many ways this question hinges on how we define success in the FYE movement and the factors that we believe contributes to a vibrant campus community.  What does a "successful" student look like at the end of their first year?  What skills, habits, and attitudes would they possess?  While the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) has contributed greatly to institutions' ability to measure certain behaviors and attitudes of students,  we don't seem to do much on our individual campuses to measure the equivalent of the "gross national happiness" for our campuses.  

What would these "intangibles" on our campuses be?  While they will vary slightly across institutions, some possibilities might include

A personal reason for being at a particular institution.  Do students know why they decided to come to your school?  Their purpose and commitment to the educational ideals and objectives at your institution will make a huge difference in their engagement and persistence.  If they don't have a set of fairly good reasons for choosing a particular campus, there is likely to be trouble down the road.

Understanding of and investment in an institutional mission.  This seems strongly correlated with the idea above, but it seems important for institutions to not only orient students to their physical surroundings, but to help them understand the culture and ideals of the institution they have enrolled in so they might become a part of the community and fulfill their role in it.  So, if you are a faith-based institution that espouses character development, do students believe in that mission and pursue that growth?  For liberal arts institutions, do your students value a well-rounded education and recognize the importance of breadth in their learning?  

Passion for learning.   What students believe and feel about learning are important.  We want life-long learners that continue to grow and make contributions to society after they leave our institutions.  Can the first-year experience nurture this passion?  How would it be measured?

This is obviously not an all inclusive list.  But, these would seem to be key indicators of the success of a FYE program.  There are others including deep learning behaviors, formation of supportive mentoring relationships, and the development of grit and persistence.  We probably can't measure them all, but what for you are the key indicators on your campus?  What could we start measuring on our campuses that would be meaningful and give us real insight into the success of our FYE programs?  

Universities need leaders who know what to count.

  

Can good teaching be measured?

In a great New York Times article on healthcare reform David Leonhardt describes the way in which Intermountain Health Care (IHC) helps increase quality and cut costs.  Among this list of best practices is the way in which IHC gathers data on the way in which physicians do their work.  Some data describes physician behaviors and other is focused on patient outcomes.  This data is reviewed and analyzed rigorously and then used to help physicians improve their practice.

A few hours after reading this article I attended a graduate-level "assessment of learning outcomes" course in BYU's Instructional Psychology & Technology department where the topic of discussion was No Child Left Behind and other federal enactments aimed at increasing the quality of education in the U.S.  There was a fairly strong sentiment among those in the room that student achievement should not be as large a factor in determining teacher effectiveness as it currently is.  

These two experiences (my reading and class discussion) left me wondering what assessment of teaching should and could look like.  It has always been interesting to me that educators want their craft to be viewed as a "viable profession," or a "respected field," but also want accountability to look much different for them than it would for say a car salesman or a doctor.  Why is it that we would fire a doctor for letting patients die, but we have a problem with applying the same logic to educators?  Please don't misconstrue this as an endorsement of NCLB.  I'm just saying that student achievement has to be part of the conversation (I also recognize that the conversation must also include discussion of what aspects of student performance should and should not be measured) and that when a particular educator's students consistently underperform (or overperform for that matter), we should make an effort to find out why.  This is what I see IHC doing in their hospitals and clinics and those of us that care about education could learn some lessons from them.

1.  Classrooms need to be structed in a way that allows for the collection of meaningful data.  By data I don't just mean test scores.  We've done that for a long time and, apparently, it isn't making a tremendous difference.  What I'm calling for are technology-supported classrooms that allow us to examine what teachers and students do while they are learning and trying to learn.  Good online learning environments like the Open High School of Utah (see also the recent SL Tribune article) are structured to gather data on student performance and what practices lead to effective learning.  It will be difficult and complex, but we need to find a way to do the same thing in traditional classrooms.  This data can then be used to help educate teachers about what they do well and where they can improve.  Observations are important, but organizations like IHC have found that objective data improves quality.  

2. "Chief quality officers" for schools/districts.  Although most school and district administrators care about the quality of teaching, the reality is that the bulk of their time and effort is taken up by other administrative duties.  What if there were a quality officer for every school as well as a similar individual for a district whose responsibility it was to ensure that data was collected on teacher performance?  These individuals could identify high performing teachers in their local area (which may or may not be those whose students score the highest on standardized tests) and then work to find out what it is that makes them successful (much like what IHC does with their physicians).  They would also be responsible for helping, not punishing, underperforming educators to revise their practices.

3.  Identification of "teaching protocols" that have been demonstrated to lead to positive outcomes.  Because they gather and analyze data so well, IHC knows what dosage of medication generally works best for a heart patient as they return home or what steps should be taken in the insertion of an IV in order to minimize the risk of infection.  Of course, there are times when physicians should and do stray from these "defaults," but more often than not the checklist they are provided with is close to exactly what a patient needs and will benefit from.  Gary Daynes' recent post on educational checklists convinced me that it wouldn't be unreasonable to develop similar checklists or standard processes for particular parts of the educational system.  This, of course, is dependent on our ability to gather data and link particular processes to positive learning outcomes for students (see #1 above).  And, like IHC, schools and districts could continue to collect data so that the checklists can be revised and refined as new information becomes available.  

As I write this I am realizing that I'm echoing a refrain that I've made on this blog before--schools need to be learning organizations that change and adapt over time.  We expect this of students. . .why don't we follow suit?

Does being "educated" include being "fit?"

This article describes a unique program at Lincoln University (Oxford, PA) that requires students identifed as "obese" to either demonstrate  that they have decreased their body mass index (BMI) or take a specially-designed "fitness for life" course that, in theory, should encourage students to adopt a more healthy lifestyle.

As you can imagine this has elicited a variety of interesting responses from members of the Lincoln community and others across the country.  My undergraduate degree is in Exercise Science and I moonlighted as a soccer coach before coming back to the academy, so you can guess where my leanings are (although I wouldn't say I agree with LU's methodology or logic).  But, the real question that this issue raised in my mind was what it means when a university awards a student a degree.

While every institution has its own unique mission and learning goals for its students, I think most would agree that one of their purposes is to provide students with experiences and opportunities that prepare them to be productive, engaged citizens who go out and do good things in the world.  To that end, institutions develop general education or core curricula that are intended to equip students with a general set of skills, attitudes, or abilities that will serve them well whether they end up performing heart surgeries, teaching 3rd graders cursive (btw, how long will that continue?  when was the last time any of us used that "general" skill?), or writing columns for the local paper.  Institutions also develop means of measuring or "assessing" what students have learned or gained in these areas and hold them to some sort of minimum standard.  If those standards are met, the student is granted a degree.  So, in some sense my degree from Brigham Young University is an indication that I have achieved a certain level of competence in the core areas that BYU deemed important when they created their University Core curriculum.

One of the many problems with the logic I have just described here is that universities don't have very good ways of measuring competence.  We subject students to a battery of tests, projects, papers, group-assignments, etc. that we hope will give us some insight into what they've learned, but most are articifial and disconnected from the real contexts and situations students will find themselves once they leave our campuses.  For instance, does the fact that I scored a total of 91% on the exams in my Child Development course mean that I will be a good father?  So, if we extrapolate this to some sort of health & wellness requirement (assuming that an institution has decided that part of a well-rounded education includes the ability to make good decisions about one's health), how does a university determine whether or not a student has achieved competence in that area?  

Looked at from this perspective, the Lincoln issue takes on a little more complexity.  Might they be onto something?  I'm not sure that I agree with the specifics of their requirement (among other things, measuring obesity at the beginning of the freshman year seems to leave out all those that become unfit during college), but there is something intriguing about a policy that requires students to demonstrate competence in a very concrete way.  Imagine how different our institutions would be if students left with a portfolio of hard evidence demonstrating what they had learned (or how much more fit they had become).  A university degree would take on a completely new meaning and employers, graduate schools, and anyone else who cares about higher education could have more confidence in knowing that college graduates do actually possess useful skills.  Right now a college degree is looking more and more like a written testament to a student's abilities to sit through long lectures and jump through hoops.

As much as we might dislike the problems with a policy like the one implemented at Lincoln, let's see what we might be able to learn from them in terms of accountability and real evidence for learning.