Are athletics a positive or negative educational force? The viewpoint widely shared across academe is that participation in intercollegiate athletics has a positive impact on students and contributes to learning and moral development. Often, this notion is captured in the phrase "character development," a shorthand way to describe the individual…

Active involvement in college activities is linked to a host of student development outcomes, including personal growth, achievement and satisfaction. Yet, to date there has been too little attention to how social class shapes campus involvement. Through an analysis of survey data of students attending a single elite university and a national…

The authors begin this chapter by revisiting Astin, Panos, and Creager (1967), who developed a conceptual scheme to guide the selection of various types of measurements organized by three dimensions: (1) type of outcome; (2) type of data; and (3) time. In assessing basic skills, general education, and attainment of the major, the focus is on…

This review offers a theoretical reformulation of student development useful for policy and research and critically assesses four bodies of theory for developmental models addressing the family, the individual, complex organizations, and the interaction between the individual and the environment, respectively. In each category several models are…

In response to a gap in the literature on student development with respect to the role of the family, and anecdotal evidence that the family's influence on the college student's development is profound, a review of the relevant literature on higher education, social psychology, psychiatry, sociology of the family, and family therapy was…

This monograph presents a review of the literature on college residence life organized around an ecosystemic model and student development theory. This model distinguishes between events and processes at four levels: suprasystem (relationship between residence and university systems); macrosystem (residence hall); mesosystem (the hall floor); and…