Winona State University

Office of Assessment

Reprinted from Hatfield, S. (Editor) The Seven Principles in Action: Improving Undergraduate Education. Boltn, Mass: Anker Press, 1995.

 

Introduction

The Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education distills findings from decades of research on the undergraduate experience into seven basic principles. These principles, which are based on a view of education as active, cooperative, and demanding, assert that good practice in undergraduate education:

The Origins of the Seven Principles Project

The Seven Principles are the result of a complex series of activities. As one of seven members of the Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in Undergraduate Education that produced Involvement in Learning (Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education, 1984)--the first in a series of reports on undergraduate education in the 1980's (Bennett, 1984; Association of American Colleges, 1985; Newman, 1985; Boyer, 1987)--I feared that these reports would fail to reach the faculty members, administrators, and students to whom they were directed. When I joined the Board of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) in the middle 1980s, I participated in the decision to embark on a series of conferences on the improvement of undergraduate education. In the discussion that led to this decision, I suggested that AAHE sponsor the development of a statement of principles for a good undergraduate education. Arthur Chickering, also a member of the AAHE Board, agreed to work with me on a plan to do so.

A few months after the AAHE board meeting, where we discussed the need for principles to guide the improvement of undergraduate education, Chickering and I attended a conference at Wingspread, the conference center in Racine, Wisconsin, operated by The Johnson Foundation. This conference brought together the authors of several of the recent reports on undergraduate education, along with a number of other observers of higher education. It was clear to Chickering and me that a statement of principles, widely disseminated to the academic community, could be an important next step in the education reform movement that was sweeping the country.

How were we to generate such a statement? We wanted the principles to represent the collective wisdom of colleagues who were knowledgeable about the research literature on the college experience. With support from the Johnson Foundation, we invited a small task force to meet for two days at Wingspread in July, 1986. The task force members included scholars who had contributed much of the research on the impact of the college experience over the last five decades, as well as other students of higher education: Alexander W. Astin of UCLA, Howard Bowen of the Claremont Colleges, William Boyd of The Johnson Foundation, Carol M. Boyer of the Education Commission of the States (a co-sponsor of the conference), K. Patricia Cross of Harvard, Kenneth Eble of the University of Utah, Russell Edgerton of AAHE (a co-sponsor of the conference), Jerry Gaff of Hamline University, Henry Halsted of The Johnson Foundation, Joseph Katz of SUNY-Stony Brook, C. Robert Pace of UCLA, Marvin Peterson of the University of Michigan, and Richard C. Richardson, Jr. of Arizona State University.

The gathering was an extraordinary event in its own right. Most of the members of the task force were acquainted with one another and knew each other's work, but they had never all met together to trace the implications of their research for the improvement of undergraduate education. Chickering and I set them a difficult task. As the call to the meeting put it, scholars of higher education will meet "to identify key principles which characterize the practices of educationally successful undergraduate institutions. Conferees will identify research which supports those characteristics and create a draft statement of principles." Chickering and I asked the participants to react to a list of eight principles which we had drawn up ahead of time, with the caveat that they were to end up with no more than nine principles, preferably fewer. Mindful of psychological research showing that most people can hold in mind between five and nine discrete items at a time, we were determined to avoid the temptation of a long laundry list of principles, even if that meant neglecting some crucial areas.

Chickering and I insisted that whatever we produce be accessible, understandable, practical, and widely applicable. We hoped to be able to get the principles on a single page, easily and cheaply produced, and even joked about a "pocket" version that administrators and faculty members could whip out at a moment's notice. The group was sensitive about the principles being misapplied by faculty members and misused by state agencies in their effort to make higher education more accountable. This concern provoked a good deal of discussion about the audiences for the eventual principles. While everyone agreed that faculty members were the most important audience -- and the primary audience for Chickering and me -- several task force members felt strongly that they should try to reach campus administrators, state higher education agencies, and government policy makers. These multiple audiences increased the complexity of the task of framing the principles.

A series of drafts criss-crossed the country, following members of the task force at home, work, and vacation. As the final draft began to take shape, Chickering and I suggested that the principles be directed primarily to faculty members in their roles as teachers, but that we also try to reach a broader audience of administrators and policy makers whose support would be necessary for the principles to take hold. A statement, which appeared in the original Principles document as "Whose Responsibility Is It?", addressed administrators about what they needed to do to encourage good practice in their institutions and urged policy makers to help campuses improve undergraduate education.

The final version of the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education appeared as the lead article in the March 1987 issue of the AAHE Bulletin (Chickering and Gamson, 1987). It began by drawing attention to criticisms of undergraduate education and moved quickly to an emphasis on campus-level improvement, listing the Seven Principles and then describing them in greater detail, with practical examples from a variety of campuses. The response to the article was immediate, and plans began soon after to re-publish it as a special section in the June 1987 issue of The Wingspread Journal, a publication of The Johnson Foundation. With the help of Susan J. Poulsen, Director of Public Communications at the Johnson Foundation, the republished version was designed for visual appeal and accessibility.

And they were ordered! More than 150,000 copies of the Seven Principles were ordered directly from The Johnson Foundation over the next 18 months from colleges and universities throughout the U.S., as well as from Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other countries. An unknown number were copied or reprinted in other publications, such as the newsletters of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and centers for teaching improvement at colleges and universities across the country (the Seven Principles were not copyrighted). A version of the principles was published in University Affairs, a news magazine on higher education in Canada. Chickering and I conducted workshops and conference sessions using the Seven Principles, asking participants to discuss how they might implement them.

The Inventories

The enthusiastic response to the Seven Principles encouraged us to develop a self-assessment instrument for faculty members, with examples and indicators of each of the principles. In keeping with the task force's recognition that even the most sophisticated, motivated faculty members needed institutional support for serious attention to teaching, we also concentrated on producing an institutional inventory, with indicators of campus practices and policies in support of the Seven Principles. With a small grant from the Lilly Endowment, we began the arduous task of selecting a small number from among the hundreds of examples of the principles from participants in workshops, from other instruments, from publications, and from our own experience. Louis Barsi, then a graduate student at George Mason University, joined us at this stage.

The final version of each inventory was designed and published in the fall of 1989 by the Johnson Foundation in two handy self-assessment booklets. The indicators in the Faculty Inventory are divided into seven sections, one for each principle. The indicators in the Institutional Inventory are divided into six sections that support good practices in undergraduate education: Climate, Academic Practices, Curriculum, Faculty, Support Services, and Facilities. Announcements of the availability of the Inventories were placed in the Johnson Foundation's Wingspread Journal and the newsletters of several national higher education associations, and an article was published in the November 1989 issue of the AAHE Bulletin (Gamson and Poulsen, 1989).

The response to the Inventories, available then at no cost, was overwhelming. Within a week, all 40,000 of the two Inventories printed by the Johnson Foundation were gone. With additional help from the Lilly Endowment, the Inventories went into a second printing. The response to the Principles and the Inventories was so astonishing that it occasioned an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Heller, 1989). A source book published in 1991 recounts the research support for the Seven Principles and draws on examples of how they have been used from a survey of institutions that requested the Seven Principles and Inventories early and from vignettes about a range of colleges and universities and a higher education association (Chickering and Gamson, 1991).

Recent Developments

Several groups have been working on adaptations of the Inventories. The Faculty Inventory has been adapted for use by students. This new Inventory will list student behaviors that contribute to the achievement of each of the principles. The Student Inventory was stimulated by William Coplin, professor of policy studies and public affairs at Syracuse University. With financial support from the Johnson Foundation, Louis Barsi, Arthur Chickering, William Coplin and Susan Poulsen met in April 1990 with Brian Hand, an alumnus of a university in the Washington, D.C. area; Karen Romer, associate dean at Brown University; Cindy Ward, a college sophomore; and Maryellen Gleason Weimer, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University. This meeting laid out the general orientation for the Student Inventory.

The Seven Principles and Inventories are also being adapted for use in research and educational improvement overseas. Arthur Chickering has begun work with senior professors at the Universite Lumiere Lyon II and the Universite Mendes Franco in Grenoble to adapt the Inventories for the French lycees. His project will involve professors at the two universities, administrators, and teachers in the lycees.

Another group, under the leadership of the Seven Principles Resource Center at Winona State University, has been adapting the Seven Principles to Total Quality Management approaches. At Wingspread in the fall of 1992, experienced practitioners of quality improvement in industry met faculty members and administrators from several colleges and universities around the country to explore this extension of the Seven Principles.

It should be evident from this account that the Seven Principles project has been highly collaborative from its beginning. It has benefited from the help of several higher education associations and two foundations. It has built on the expertise of some of the leading scholars of higher education. Most important, it has drawn on the ideas of hundreds of faculty members and administrators in colleges and universities around the country. Their examples of the Seven Principles and suggestions about ways they might be implemented permeate the Inventories through and through. We are at the point of examining how the Principles and Inventories have been used in several colleges and universities described in this volume, as well as ways they can yet be adapted and applied.

A final note: The new Student Inventory will be published by the Seven Principles Resource Center at Winona State University, which has taken over the production and distribution of the Seven Principles and Inventories. The Seven Principles Resource Center will establish a resource library of materials relating to the use and effectiveness of the Seven Principles and Inventories. To order copies or obtain more information, contact:

References

Association of American Colleges. Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges, 1985.

Bennett, W. J. To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.

Boyer, E. L. College: The Undergraduate Experience in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

Chickering, A. W. and Gamson, Z. F. "Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." AAHE Bulletin, 1987, 39 (7), 3-7.

Chickering, A. W. and Gamson, Z. F. "Applying the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." New Directions in Teaching and Learning. No. 47, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.

Gamson, Z. F., and Poulsen, S. J. "Inventories of Good Practice: The Next Step for the Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education." AAHE Bulletin, 1989, 47 (3), 7-8, 14.

Heller, S. "Delighted Authors Find Their Agenda for Education Is a Huge Hit." Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 1989, pp. A41, A43.

Newman, F. Higher Education and the American Resurgence. Princeton, NJ.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1985.

Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education. Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1984.