On Wednesday, Nov. 5, a survey was sent out to the St. Olaf student body to gather data on student perceptions of character, character development, and educational programming related to character development. The data will inform a future character development program at St. Olaf, which will be funded by a $630,000 grant from Wake Forest University through their Educating Character Initiative (ECI).
The creation of the program was initially proposed in St. Olaf’s strategic plan, “Solution Seekers,” and the implementation is being led by Associate Professor of Religion and Department Chair of Race, Ethnic, Gender and Sexuality Studies Anthony Bateza. Bateza is working with a team of representatives from the president’s leadership team, Admissions, student organizations, the Piper Center for Vocation and Career, and other staff and faculty members.
“A lot of times, we talk about St. Olaf as one of these colleges that changes lives, as a dream school … and I believe those things,” Bateza said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger. “Part of the idea is that we need to be more explicit about what we’re doing at St. Olaf that’s different [from other colleges], particularly how we’re forming people and being formed by people to look at the world differently.”
Every year, students in Foundations of Social Science Research (SOAN 371) help a client conduct social science research on campus through survey creation and data analysis. Bateza was chosen to be this year’s client, and the data collected from the survey will allow the implementation team to incorporate student feedback into the future program.
“In this initial stage, we want to get a baseline for how people are talking about character, exemplars in their lives, the places that they’ve been shaped to think about character,” Bateza said. “We want to get a sense for what language resonates with students … take a step back, have the students tell us what they actually think, what resonates with them, and make sure we adapt to meet students in ways that will be useful.”
Associate Professor of Practice in Sociology/Anthropology Ryan Sheppard is teaching two sections of SOAN 371 this semester. The students from both sections were divided into eight teams, each of which got to create one portion of the survey and host a focus group prior to the survey’s construction.
“We can’t assume that previous research is generalizable to St. Olaf students,” Sheppard said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger. “We need to bridge that gap before we construct the survey … based on those things [said in focus groups], then we design the survey questions.”
The SOAN 371 students spent a large portion of survey creation considering survey length, wording of questions, and response options. By the end of the course, the students will have analyzed the data on their respective sections and present their findings to Bateza and the rest of the program implementation team.
The survey closed on Nov. 14, but more research will be conducted as the character development program is implemented over the next three years. Students from SOAN 371 hope that their contributions will support both the program and their fellow students.
“I think it’s a big deal considering how much money this grant is,” Julia Grayson ’27 said in an interview with The Olaf Messenger. “We’ve been reading literature, talking with students in focus groups, [and] it seems like something that would make a difference at St. Olaf to grow as human beings and learn more about ourselves.”
