stanford course work

stanford course work

Exploring the Impact of Stanford Coursework on Student Success

1. Introduction to Stanford University and its Academic Programs

The undergraduate experience is what many observers think of when they consider Stanford. The University offers undergraduate students a remarkable opportunity to interact with leading scholars, pursue advanced research in a variety of academic disciplines, and challenge other bright and committed students. Undergraduates at Stanford can major in any of more than 75 subject areas, many of which overlap or are the same as those offered at institutions like MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley. Graduate students study in one of seven schools at Stanford: the School of Medicine, the School of Education, the Graduate School of Business, the School of Engineering, Law School, the School of Earth Sciences, and the School of Humanities and Sciences. With singular and joint degree programs, Stanford offers students broad and diverse opportunities not only to learn, but also to create knowledge and improve the human condition.

In this report, we describe the journey that launched the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), present some of the survey results, and illustrate the kind of analysis we hope to undertake in the future. While not definitive, the data raise some intriguing questions which will form the basis for subsequent reports. Our intention is to contribute to the broader national research agenda on the determinants of student success in higher education and beyond, and deliver scientifically based evidence to Stanford administrators, faculty, students, parents, donors, and policymakers.

Stanford University is located in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most entrepreneurial and innovative communities. Stanford students are among the most productive and motivated young adults in the country. Little was known, however, about the impact of Stanford’s unique academic programs on students’ outcomes later in life. To help address this gap, we collected individual-level data from Stanford undergraduate and graduate students using a web-based survey and merged the data with administrative records from the university registrar.

2. Theoretical Framework: Understanding the Role of Coursework in Student Success

Understanding the impacts of coursework is crucial for understanding the drivers of academic success – and not merely the drivers of course grades. Many courses, particularly at the intersection of two or more disciplines, may serve students’ interest and push their thinking, yet also be more likely to challenge them. They can also connect students with faculty who help guide academic and career choices. This is a vital correspondence; at Stanford, for instance, applying one’s major in a future career was correlated with happiness fifteen years out from college, and major dissatisfaction was the second most frequently declared regret by Stanford alumni with a major that did not contribute at all to their enrolled in 1989. This present research explores what coursework factors correlate with success outcomes – broad excellence, one major-gained preference, and another major-earned preference – in pursuit of this understanding.

One underexplored contribution to understanding differences in students’ excellence and preference for a major, relating to academic success, is a simple and intuitive one – the coursework students take. This is apparent from the literature, which connects course inputs during college with a number of student success outcomes, particularly students’ character, skill set, preparedness for the workforce, sense of self, and even success in major completion. Furthermore, a growing body of research provides evidence that curriculum is not merely a channel through which students begin to gain knowledge and skills, but also a determinant of such outcomes. This current study contributes to this literature by studying the impact of coursework – including grades, specific prerequisites, and who is taking them – on three student success outcomes using data from Stanford University.

3. Empirical Studies on the Relationship Between Stanford Coursework and Student Outcomes

Studies examining the relationships between college coursework and students’ success have been undertaken since the early 20th century. Surveys of literature on available empirical studies indicate that examination of the relationships rarely distinguished between different work completed by students, contributing to variability in the types of college coursework considered, definitions of student success, and the timing of its measurement. In the broadest terms, relationships between college coursework and students’ success are studied using samples of convenience, measurement error, and the problem of endogeneity. Sub-discipline work can capture only some of the relationships. Due to the dominance of economics education research, college coursework is often operationalized with a varying number of intermediate microeconomics, macroeconomics, principles of economics, and economics majors class components of teachers, class sizes, time and effort devoted to classroom and out-of-class activities, and different types of philosophical and pedagogical beliefs. Use of non-standard classroom practices, mixed methods studies, and databases of scores, grades, or field-experiment choices encourages the consideration of time, gender, and other heterogeneous effects, cheating behavior, beliefs, and learning outcomes for students (and graduates) with different sets of characteristics, and misestimates or does not model the differences between first-college-preparedness or later-interactions (preparing second best data in the field).

Given the increasing prevalence of non-standard grading and non-student-reported coursework qualitative data in research fields such as (e-)learning, economics, and computer science education, this paper first presents an inventory of audit trails that illustrate the prevalence of these patterns across the different domains. It then uses these findings to assess whether pieces of coursework, non-standard coding patterns, and repositories of attributes for these types of data can be used unambiguously or guarantee anonymous feedback while preserving the original research data while also being transparent and standardizable. In turn, the discussion supports the combination of academic and pedagogical efforts to develop non-confidential, publishable databases of student-authored coursework for and across (e-)learning, economics, and computer science education research that support human and machine use of education datasets.

4. Innovative Teaching Methods and Technologies in Stanford Courses

Some of the learning practices we explore are essentially technology-enabled. In some instances, students may engage with online resources and activities on their own time. These can, in turn, inform discussions in the classroom, which may themselves be technology-enabled through the use of clickers and related types of technologies. There are many questions about the impact of these new technologies on student learning. Preliminary evidence from a wide variety of courses suggests flexibility in technology choice: non-traditional courses appear to capture similar learning practices as traditional ones. Stable results across non-experimental courses using vastly different pedagogies are consistent with broader convergent validity concerns about any measure.

In addition to considering analyzing pedagogies from different perspectives, our study contributes to the literature related to innovative teaching methods and technologies. Data collection began in spring 2015. Many of the courses reported here were taken within the last several years, which is a period of growth with respect to the technologies available to faculty for use in their courses. If education is, as Bain (2004) suggests, something akin to a fashion industry in which its members readily adopt new teaching methods and materials perceived to be successful, then these data – limited as they are – provide some evidence of the impact of these new technologies, especially relative to traditional offerings.

5. Conclusion: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice

For subjects such as chemistry and introductory economics, it is likely that students would make better progress if they received more support in the form of tutoring or if they went through the class in groups. Dropout rates in high school are known to fall when at-risk students receive more personal attention. Our study suggests that a similar benefit might be derived by offering more academic handholding to non-elite students once they reach college. For other undergraduate courses, students experience early losses of confidence in their writing and analytical abilities. Although students will need to gain those skills on their own, instructors in the Seminar program might consider providing students more structured feedback on those skills. Such feedback would not cheapen any of the observed growth that takes place within these courses, while allowing students to better focus their energies on strengthening the hand-in-hand skills: effort and approach.

How can schools better help prepare their students for success in college? Insights from an analysis of a set of Stanford Introductory Seminars provide several lessons of potential use to educators and parents. We find that success in college is tied to a variety of noncognitive factors including confidence in one’s abilities to master challenging material, perseverance in the face of obstacles, and a set of goal-setting and study habits. These factors appear to be a product of students’ experiences in school, particularly in their high school coursework. Although an important role in building these skills falls squarely within the province of traditional high school teachers, college outreach organizations such as the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and its equal partner the University also can play a useful role by trying to translate the advice offered in the following concrete ways.