The soft values of SI: Using surveys to assist in providing quality assurance for an SI program

The main goals of SI are usually to improve learning and student performance as well as increasing retention. The achievement of these goals are evaluated based on linking SI attendance with retention and student results (student performance is here often seen as a proxy for learning). However, the objectives with introducing an SI-program at a higher education institute is often so much more than these three goals. For instance, you want SI to help students to become independent active learners where they see fellow students as learning resources and as a result develop a network of study partners. You also want SI to help students train critical thinking, presentation skills, teamwork and collaboration, problem solving, develop study strategies and skills as well as obtaining a better confidence in studies. Although it is quite likely that supervisors running SI programs try to evaluate if they achieve these additional goals, very little information and results are actually available in the literature. The present study focus on the use of questionnaires to evaluate these soft goals of SI as well as providing quality assurance for the program. The questionnaires may be focused on the participants and leaders’ reflections on the SI program at the end of the course or questionnaires that are more specialized on a specific topic. Examples of questionnaire results for a specific SI program are presented. It is shown that several additional soft goals are achieved. For instance, most students attending SI feel that their abilities in critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork, presentations improve. Furthermore, most participants get a better academic confidence and take more responsibility for their learning. Also a significant portion of the students build a network of study partners through SI.
Participants at this session will be involved by inviting them to group discuss on topics like
• “what additional goals do they have with SI besides improving student performance and increasing retention?”,
• “to what extent do they use surveys or qualitative methods like focus groups to evaluate these additional goals?”, and
• “what results did they get from these additional evaluations?”.