The Science Community Year
Addressing Attrition in Science

Purpose

The Science Community Year (SCY) was designed to help retain students in science and mathematics courses and majors. It is a learning community model in which a group of students enrolled in a common set of courses meets in seminar to integrate the lea rning from those courses. The seminar is led by a "master learner," a faculty member who is himself or herself a novice in math or one of the sciences and who takes the courses along with the students.

Open to any freshman student taking more than one mathematics or science course, the SCY seminar met once a week for 75 minutes, and gave students an opportunity to talk about their experiences in science, to work on problem-solving skills, to learn about the history and philosophy of mathematics and science, and to take field trips demonstrating the applicability of their learning to possible careers. The master learners were non-science faculty, in one case the president emeritus. In addition to str uggling through the courses with the students, the master learners helped to convey to course instructors a sense of students' problems and frustrations, thus contributing to considerable pedagogical and curricular change.

Innovative Features

Using the learning community model to serve the purpose of retention was a variation on an approach which, since its inception at SUNY/Stony Brook in the mid-1970s, has been adapted to a wide variety of circumstances. At Rollins, the seminar served pri marily to build community and help students to cope with a particularly demanding curriculum, rather than integrate learning. Although students were enrolled in two or more mathematics or science courses concurrently, the courses were not the same ones i n all instances. Instead, students shared the experience of being freshmen and trying to get established as science students.

Evaluation

The informal discussion in the SCY seminar of the freshmen's and the master learner's experiences and problems in their math/science courses provided a continuing formative evaluation of the SCY. The project director also arranged for two qualitative evaluations, after the first and fourth years of the project, by faculty from other institutions who were known for their expertise in science pedagogy.

The most direct evidence of the SCY's efficacy came from comparing the course enrollment patterns of SCY and non-SCY students following the first semester. Of the non-SCY students, 56 percent enrolled in the second part of two-semester course sequences begun during their first semester at Rollins; 53 percent completed this second course. Students in the SCY seminar had a course re-enrollment rate of 71 percent and a completion rate of 68 percent.

Of those who enrolled in the first semester of the introductory science sequence, 17 percent of non-SCY students went on to declare majors in science, as opposed to 35 percent of SCY students. Of those who completed the second semester of the sequence, 31 percent of non-SCY students declared a science major, while 51 percent of SCY students did so.

Since high school grade point averages and SAT scores of SCY and non-SCY students were virtually identical, these large differences in outcome cannot be attributed to differences in basic ability. Initial interest in science, however, was not controlled.

No significant difference was observed in the persistence in science courses of male and female SCY students as compared to their non-SCY counterparts. SCY men and women went on in science in approximately equal proportions, and exceeded the rates for non-SCY men and women to roughly the same degree. However, in a puzzling result, approximately equal percentages of SCY and non-SCY minority students continued in science; the SCY did not have the effect on minority students that it did on the group as a whole.

Project Impact

The informal feedback that departments obtained through the master learners contributed to a revision of biology laboratories to make them more investigative, a reconsideration by the chemistry department of the pace of its beginning course, and the int roduction of student journal writing in freshman mathematics courses as a way of providing feedback for the instructor.

As a result of the SCY experience, Rollins introduced courses into its January term that support skill development in chemistry, calculus, and pre-calculus. The science and social science divisions organized a Quantitative Teaching and Learning Center to parallel the English Department's Writing Center.

Lessons Learned

Feedback from students indicates the clear value of the support and encouragement provided by the SCY community. According to students, knowing that they and their master learners were in the same situation and had to face the same problems was the most important aspect of the seminars. They also found the field trips, and the link they established between theory and practice, of significant value.

The problem-solving exercises elicited mixed reviews, and the readings in history and philosophy distinctly negative ones. These have been replaced with readings on current science topics of general interest. Students' realization of their deficiencies in science study skills resulted in some additional emphasis on these matters.

Project Continuation

The SCY program was absorbed into the "College Conference Courses," a first-year requirement for all students. Students are assigned to the Conference Course taught by their freshman year adviser. Two sections of SCY, now a one-semester, three-credit course, are normally offered. However, the SCY seminar was not taught in 1996.

The SCY program did significantly affect the organization of the Conference Courses by matching, for the first time, students' academic interests with advisers in those disciplines.

Available Information

Further information about the project may be obtained from:

Toni Strollo
Box 2749
Rollins College
1000 Holt Ave.
Winter Park, FL 32789-4499

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