Learning Through Community: Best Practices and Assessment

Access to College Excellence (ACE) at UHM provides a series of first year programs that serve approximately 25% of incoming freshmen a year. A major ACE program is Learning Communities, in which ACE staff helps students to register a collection of courses in a cluster (e.g., general education, pre-business) and an Access to College Community freshman seminar course: CAS 110. All the students who registered for the courses in one cluster form a cohort—a learning community. CAS 110 enhances the community by helping students reaching the following learning outcomes: (1) building effective study and time management skills; (2) setting goals for success; (3) learning about the academic resources available; (4) learning core and major graduation requirements at UHM. This poster introduces the ACE learning communities and how it assesses the outcomes by using a pre- and post-survey method. The poster will present quantitative results from the closed-ended questions and qualitative results from the open-ended questions. The presenter will also present the impact of ACE Learning Communities by comparing the retention rates between the participants and non-participants, and between the less-engaged and more-engaged participants.

Access to College Excellence (ACE) at UHM provides a series of first year programs that serve approximately 25% of incoming freshmen a year. A major ACE program is Learning Communities, in which ACE staff helps students to register a collection of courses in a cluster (e.g., general education, pre-business) and an Access to College Community freshman seminar course: CAS 110. All the students who registered for the courses in one cluster form a cohort—a learning community. CAS 110 enhances the community by helping students reaching the following learning outcomes: (1) building effective study and time management skills; (2) setting goals for success; (3) learning about the academic resources available; (4) learning core and major graduation requirements at UHM. This poster introduces the ACE learning communities and how it assesses the outcomes by using a pre- and post-survey method. The poster will present quantitative results from the closed-ended questions and qualitative results from the open-ended questions. The presenter will also present the impact of ACE Learning Communities by comparing the retention rates between the participants and non-participants, and between the less-engaged and more-engaged participants. By Kyle Van Duser

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