The ELI impact areas were created as a result of a comprehensive literature review at the start of the initiative. Within each category, the assessment team identified several distinct competencies that align with these impacts. The outcomes of experiential learning include increasing students’ confidence and ability to:
- Innovate and take risks
- Self-efficacy: belief in one’s own ability to perform well in a variety of circumstances
- Resolve: ability to act despite uncertainty of success
- Creativity: ability to sample ideas and retrieve or form unconventional knowledge
- Solve complex problems
- Complex reasoning: ability to extend and refine knowledge by comparing, contrasting, abstracting
- Incorporating perspectives: capacity to understand where others’ ideas come from and negotiate/apply perspectives
- Collaborate across differences
- Communication skills: ability to effectively convey information to others
- Cultural intelligence: ability to function effectively in culturally diverse contexts
- Empathy: aptitude for understanding another person’s inner experiences and feelings
- Think critically and reflect on learning
- Connecting theory to practice: competence in applying abstract ideas to connect situations
- Reflection: capacity to intentionally explore and appraise experiences to create meaning for the benefit of learning
This set of competencies is not exhaustive. Through our work with experiential learning, DCAL intends to explore a wide range of strategies for enhancing student learning and development through experience and reflection across Dartmouth’s liberal arts education.
Which Impact Areas is your project focusing on? We recommend focusing on Think Critically and Reflect on Learning and at least one other one. Explain below.
We have two sets of impact areas, one for the undergraduate cohort and one for the graduate cohort.
Undergraduate students:
In each of the courses, undergraduate students will undertake open-ended research-type projects individually or in groups. While broad project topics are developed by the instructional team, specific development and implementation is precisely connecting theory to practice - taking mathematical knowledge and applying it in a novel and often ambiguous situation. Project topics require complex reasoning as solutions are not straight-forward, requiring developing and connecting multiple ideas. Finally, the process of developing a project problem and solving it touches on all of the areas under the umbrella of innovating and taking risks.
Graduate students:
Graduate students serve as mentors to the undergraduates and guides to the projects and hence focus mostly on collaborating across differences. Undergraduates in the target courses come from different backgrounds and have different goals for their educational experience, so the graduate students must hone their communication skills in addressing a fairly broad audience. In helping to develop and advise on the project areas, students will engage material more deeply and from different perspectives than their previous experiences (likely as students in a course). As with the undergraduate students, this offers the opportunity to translate their theoretical learning into practice through their pedagogical efforts. Moreover, it provides multiple points of reflection around their own mathematical training.