Although diversity on college campuses is widely viewed as crucial for learning, negative experiences with students from other backgrounds may actually hurt undergraduates’ intellectual development, a new study suggests.
The study, based on tests administered to college students as both freshmen and seniors, linked negative experiences with diversity to declines both in students’ critical-thinking skills and their “need for cognition,” or tendency to be intellectually engaged.
Positive experiences with diversity, on the other hand, appeared linked to increased need for cognition but to have no real impact on their critical thinking, a paper summarizing the study’s findings says.
The paper, which is not yet available online, cautions that enrolling a diverse student body does not guarantee positive or meaningful interactions between students from different backgrounds, even though it does represent “an important starting point.”
“Apart from preventing or responding to negative interactions,” it says, “administrators and faculty need to be intentional about creating environments to encourage positive interactions. A good starting point includes improving faculty skills in teaching at increasingly diverse institutions.”
The study differs from much other research on diversity on college campuses in its attempt to objectively measure the educational impact of diversity experiences and in its willingness to consider their downside as well as their upside. Most other research on diversity reflects ideological polarization on the subject as a result of the legal and political debate over race-conscious college-admissions policies.
Critics of such policies, including many conservative groups, have focused on trying to show that the policies confer unfair advantages on black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants, and set up many such students for academic failure.
Supporters of race-conscious admissions have published numerous studies arguing that diversity produces educational benefits, but generally have based such conclusions on the subjective impressions that students, faculty members, or administrators have offered in surveys. More nuanced and evenhanded research on the subject has tended to emerge mainly during lulls in the affirmative-action debate.
Bad With Good
The new examination of the impact of both positive and negative diversity experiences is based on data on nearly 2,700 students in the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, a large-scale, longitudinal study led by the Center of Inquiry at Wabash College, in Indiana. The study assesses students at four-year colleges both in the fall and spring of their freshman year and again in the spring of their senior year. In addition to gauging their intellectual development, it asks students about their college experiences.
The Wabash assessments given students after their freshman fall ask several questions about their experiences with students who are from different racial or ethnic backgrounds or who hold different values, religious beliefs, or political views.
Participants in the study are asked to estimate, on a five-point scale ranging from “very often” to “never,” how often their encounters with such students lead to negative experiences such as feeling silenced by prejudice and discrimination, feeling insulted or threatened based on their backgrounds, or having interactions that were hurtful or tense.
Similarly, students are asked how often such encounters lead to positive experiences such as sharing personal feelings and problems or having discussions that are meaningful and honest or that deal with intergroup relations.
The Wabash data used for the new diversity study came from three cohorts of students, who entered college as freshmen in 2006, 2007, or 2008. They represented 28 liberal-arts colleges, six research universities, and nine regional institutions.
Among other things, the paper on the new study says that:
- When it came to how students’ critical-thinking skills appeared to be affected by diversity interactions, their own race or ethnicity did not matter much. For both white and minority students, negative diversity experiences were related to reduced critical-thinking scores, regardless of what positive diversity experiences they also may have had. Positive diversity experiences were not related to gains in critical thinking for either group.
- How diversity interactions related to students’ need for cognition, or tendency to be intellectually engaged, appeared much more dependent on the students’ backgrounds and overall college experiences. The relationship between positive diversity experiences and improved need for cognition appeared greater for white students than for minority students. Students who reported frequent positive experiences with diversity appeared less affected by negative ones.
- Interacting with diverse peers left students more likely to have both positive and negative diversity experiences. Among students who had a high level of positive diversity interactions, almost 40 percent also reported having a high level of negative ones. Among students who experienced a low level of positive diversity interactions, almost 60 percent also experienced a low level of negative ones.
The paper, presented last month at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference, cautions that the study had several limitations. Among them, the group of colleges involved, rather than being nationally representative, was relatively selective and dominated by liberal-arts institutions. As is the case with all observational studies, the researchers could establish correlations, but not causality, in examining how the factors they studied related to one another. The small number of racial and ethnic minority students in the sample left the researchers feeling compelled to lump all such students together in a single “minority” category.
Among the paper’s authors are Josipa Roksa, an associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia, and two administrators of the Center of Inquiry at Wabash College, Charles Blaich, its director, and Kathleen S. Wise, its associate director. Also involved in the study were three scholars at the University of Iowa’s Center for Research on Undergraduate Education: Ernest T. Pascarella, a professor of higher education and the center’s director, and two doctoral students, Cindy A. Kilgo and Teniell L. Trolian.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
