Residence Life launched a national housing survey from November through December 2009 to assess student satisfaction with the program.
The purpose of the survey, called the ACUHO-I/EBI Resident Assessment, was to provide insight into resident perceptions and help Residence Life identify strengths and areas of improvement.
“The ACUHO-I/EBI Resident Assessment is a normalized assessment, which is an assessment that is not developed, special or specific to your institution so, whereby, with the data, you can benchmark with other schools,” Seuth Chaleunphonh, dean of Student Life and acting director of Residence Life, said.
Some of the other schools who were asked to participate were the University of Indianapolis, Colorado State University and Pennsylvania College of Technology.
“The reason why [benchmarking] made more sense to us is that we’re a new program,” Chaleunphonh said. “We’re only on our second year. We don’t have 10 years of data to see how far we’ve come.”
Of the students living on campus last semester, 174 residents participated. This included 59 percent first-year students, 70 percent females and 15 percent transfer students.
Some of the satisfactions with the Residence Life included safety and security, facilities, staff and services.
A new student to the Residence Life program, Hope Kessinger, geography freshman, said her impressions of the dorms are positive. Kessinger lives in Orchard Lodge in a four-person, four-bedroom dorm.
“I decided to move into the dorms so I could experience living on my own, away from my family,” Kessinger said. “I feel that the dorms are really nice and worth the money I paid to live here. They are in a good location and the space is reasonable.”
One of the new ideas that came out of the survey and had been identified as something people wanted more of was programming.
“When we looked at it at the end of the semester, we noticed we had more programs, but we didn’t have as many large scale programs and regular predictable programs,” Chaleunphonh said. “Basically, what our community advisers have come up with are just different, predictable things that the students can count on.”
Another addition for Residence Life is the room assignment change process. In the Residence Life survey, the students who were involved in choosing their roommates were more satisfied.
“This past fall, we had really high occupancy and so it’s hard when you have, like in musical chairs, every chair full, and you can’t move unless someone else wants to move,” Chaleunphonh said.
Some of the learning outcomes that came out of the survey and were recognized as strengths were time management, study, solving problems and personal interactions.
“The way we do it is we would look at these categories and see we are strong at these categories so we’ll continue with those, but we’re not as strong at these, so we might need to work on them more,” Chaleunphonh said.
The survey has also helped the Residence Life plan for future changes in upcoming semesters. One possibility is beginning Living-Learning Communities.
“What that would entail would be to see if there is enough of a population for certain academic programs and would these students want to live in a cluster close together,” Chaleunphonh said.
The Living-Learning Communities would be based on students with the same or similar major coming together and living with one another. The academic department for that major could also offer specific programs for those students.
“If you think about that type of program, students are just now getting into their program or major so there is a give and take between when we get [Living-Learning Communities] going and when students are ready,” Chaleunphonh said.
By CLAIRE MUNN
Staff Writer
clamunn@umail.iu.edu