Thirty years in, learning communities' trajectory is still up

An already enviable 70% capture rate of first-year students in an Iowa State learning community in fall 2015 grew to 95% last fall, the 30th year for one of the nation's celebrated learning community programs. The steady growth in participation, starting in 1995 with 12% of first-year students, has been matched by higher retention and graduation rates for those cohorts. 

Even while Iowa State made strides in its overall retention and graduation rates during those years, the learning community cohort remained 4-6 percentage points ahead of classmates not in a learning community (see table). Simply put, learning communities make a difference. The program is one of Iowa State's nine high-impact practices for undergraduate education.

At its core, the job of a learning community is timeless, said director Jennifer Leptien, who has led the program since 2016 and served for the previous decade as its program coordinator. It's a rare high school graduate who doesn't arrive on their college campus with three basic questions: Can I handle the academics, will I make friends and how do I talk to faculty? Learning communities intentionally address those unknowns through academic support and social activities for first-year students, she said.

"The special sauce here is that our university culture supports learning communities. Our culture is centered on the student experience -- it's one of the 'To Be' statements of our strategic plan," Leptien said.

She credits many teams on campus for the program's longevity and success: admissions and marketing staff for spreading the word among incoming students, residence staff for carving out spaces for residential learning communities, enrollment analytics teams that track student data to see what's working, registrar staff for scheduling core classes and reserving seats in course sections for learning community teammates.

"It takes so many to make this a success," Leptien said.

And that's not counting the 97 coordinators and 600-plus peer mentors powering Iowa State's 79 learning communities this year.

Unlike any other

Leptien served as president of the National Learning Communities Association in 2022-23, and Iowa State hosted the group's national conference in November. The high participation in Iowa State's learning communities program "always gets people's attention," she said. 

A former Iowa Stater, Mimi Benjamin, who gave the keynote address at that conference, concurs. Benjamin now serves as professor in the student affairs in higher education master's program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Penn., following a decade (1997-2007) at Iowa State in various student affairs roles, including on the learning communities advisory committee, co-chairing its peer mentors subcommittee. 

"For a learning community program that's opt-in, that level of participation is really unusual," she said. Other institutions achieve that kind of participation only by requiring their freshmen to join a learning community.

Two key factors contribute to those near-saturation rates, Benjamin said: Buy-in from across campus -- despite the extra work they create for employees juggling other duties -- and a set of clear expectations for all learning communities.

"It lets Iowa State have different kinds of learning communities. Coordinators can add features to make it their own, but they all meet some core expectations if they're going to be called a learning community. It gives the coordinators some guidance, and that's really smart," she said.

For example, all members of a learning community take a core group of courses together, enjoy out-of-class activities and lean a bit on sophomore or junior peer mentors as they transition to college. Twenty of the 79 this year include a residence component. Some teams have an English link, in which students can pursue topics relevant to their major or discipline in their writing assignments.

Even as it expanded over the decades, the program rejected a cookie cutter approach, instead allowing various models of learning communities to thrive. Each community meets the desired outcomes of its department or major. 

Motivated leaders sustain it

Leptien said faculty and staff learning community coordinators have a better understanding of the first-year student experience because of their access to it. Many of them have served for 10-20 years or more. 

"These are people who intrinsically are motivated to support student success," she said.

Alumnus (B.S., 2001) and associate professor of biochemistry Eric Underbakke inherited the biochemistry learning community from a retiring colleague not long after he arrived as a faculty member in 2014. Recipient of the 2023 James Huntington Ellis Award for excellence in undergraduate introductory teaching, he leads the undergraduate program for his department and teaches Biochemistry 1010. 

"I think this is such an important foundation for our student experience," he said. "I value why it's there and I want to make sure we do this with consistency and at a high level."

The learning community is the beginning of our first-year students feeling like they're a part of something, that they're members of the biochemistry program. I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing how active they become -- and how quickly.

-- Eric Underbakke, associate professor of biochemistry

Desired outcomes for the biochemistry group include understanding the career landscape (a third of biochemistry undergrads pursue a Ph.D.), affirming that faculty are approachable, and demonstrating that the department "has an early on-ramp to students joining research teams that interest them."

"Our learning community lowers the barriers to those research opportunities, demystifies them," Underbakke said. "We're invested in educating future problem solvers and scientists who will make discoveries."

And while he talks about "capital-S science," the route to it might involve some capital-F fun. Woven into sessions on crafting a four-year plan, resume writing, careers or the Academic Success Center, for example, are introductory tours of faculty research labs, ISU Jeopardy, games of biochemistry pictionary, lab olympics (seven competitive events that test knowledge of laboratory protocols), a Bob Ross-like painting session of biochemistry 'still life' or a Q&A with an alumni panel.

Peer mentors make it fly

Benjamin said trained and supervised peer mentors are a powerful layer in any kind of student program, so they just make sense for learning communities. Leptien lauded her peer mentors' dedication to their learning communities, across the board.

"They care very much that students coming to campus feel supported. They just really want to give back to the program they once were in," she said.

Biochemistry peer mentor and junior Kellian Dillon fits that description pretty well. Outgoing by nature, she still wrestled with the transition from her rural Iowa high school (graduating class of 56 students) to a large university.

Her learning community session was the best hour of her week that fall.

"What I remember most was getting to know my peers just through conversations, and getting comfortable with professors. They came to our sessions and shared their stories. It's actually really helpful to hear they once were lost like I felt lost. It really humanizes them," she said.

The learning community still feels like the hub, the place from which to observe and access the biochemistry program, she added. And membership continues to pay dividends, even though her role has shifted to peer mentor.

"Now, when I'm in my rigorous classes in STEM, I'm with people I already know really well because of the learning community," she said. "I'm a lot less intimidated to ask my peers for help. Without those connections, it would be a lot more difficult to stay in these classes."

Underbakke holds a weekly planning session with Dillon and 10 other peer mentors, who then run the learning community gathering later in the week. 

"I set up the system and help plan it, but they're brainstorming ways to implement it. The face of the learning community is those peer mentors. They're running the show, leading the discussions, introducing guests -- and they're fantastic," he said. "They're fun to work with, and I consistently hear that the students value their ground-level insights."

The right duo 30 years ago

Leptien said much of the program's success goes back to the work of founding co-directors, Doug Gruenewald and Corly Blahnik (formerly Brooke). He was the assistant director for academic services in the residence department; she was a faculty member and the second director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.

"The two of them had the ability to unite people so, with many others from campus, they really focused on improving student retention and improving teaching to support first-year student success," she said. "A big piece of that was assessment and continuous academic improvement. They were always looking at ways to move the needle and improve the experience.

"They really shifted the culture, but it's lasted for 30 years," Leptien said. 

"Any program has to have some upper-level champions, and this has been a priority at Iowa State for a long time and across multiple presidents, provosts and senior vice presidents of student affairs."

First-year students in ISU learning communities