Liberalized or Reexamined? College-Going and Student Self-Authored Worldview Commitment

• In Event: 51.037 - Embracing the Whole Student: Perspectives on College Student Development

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institutional conditions and educational practices associated with the development of first-year students’ capacity to script their own religious, spiritual, and worldview narrative through exposure to and thoughtful reflection of encounters with diverse others. We used a longitudinal design to administer a theoretically-derived and empirically-validated measure of interfaith experiences to 7,194 first-year students enrolled in one of 122 institutions. Analytically, we weighted data to reflect national figures regarding first year students and used hierarchical linear modeling to account for students nested within institutions. Results indicate individual student development was related to institutional commitments to interfaith learning and attending at least two formal interfaith co-curricular experiences during the first year in college.

Authors

• Matthew J. Mayhew, The Ohio State University

• Alyssa N. Rockenbach, North Carolina State University

• Laura Stiltz Dahl, North Dakota State University