Learning from Diverse Scholarship

Abstract

The editorial board of Innovative Higher Education shows an interest in and willingness to publish articles across a wide range of important topics and research issues in higher education, as evidenced by volume 31, 4. In this issue, the authors report on a course and instructional method for building student inquiry skills, institutional change and online program development, assessment techniques to improve student learning, and a research methodology useful for administrative planning; in each article, I found something useful for my research and teaching, and I hope you will do the same. Justice and colleagues focused on student learning at the course level, and they describe in detail an inquiry based course which they have refined over 5 years. The purpose of the article is to share the process and components of an inquiry based course, and I did gather some ideas for my courses. However, what caught my eye was the statement that the course led to “...statistically positive differences in students earning passing grades, achieving Honors staying on the Dean’s Honors List, and remaining in the University.” With student college retention on the national agenda, we must be deliberate in determining what makes a difference in student engagement and persistence. As educators, we look for those interventions that can make a difference, that are backed with evidence, that are thoroughly described for replication. I think this article provides enough detail to allow for replication in first year seminars or graduate education. Considering that failure to complete the doctoral dissertation is quite high in some areas, perhaps a graduate level, inquiry based course would be useful for students who are struggling in developing research questions, understanding alternative explanations, or explicating a theoretical framework. I think that sometimes we err in assuming that graduate students have developed all of the “fundamental” skills. Lake and Puschak describe one university’s effort to reallocate resources to create online courses and to increase enrollments in graduate programs. The reallocation was touted as beneficial to the institution and a service to non-traditional students in rural areas. They recount the changing student demographics nationally and the local and state context that led to the reallocations. I kept thinking about how this was done, and that change is never Innov High Educ (2007) 31: 199–200 DOI 10.1007/s10755-006-9026-4