Danieley Neighborhood shares spring 2023 update

In Danieley Neighborhood’s Winter 2023 update, the Danieley Neighborhood shared about its plans for top-down alignment with Boldy Elon, building a culture of assessment and data transparency. The neighborhood talked about the data it collected, what salient themes were apparent and what could be done to address them moving forward.

Now, as the 2022-2023 academic year concludes, the Danieley Neighborhood wants to provide its spring update!

Where is Danieley in its assessment process currently?

In the multilevel assessment process (MAP) outlined by Strine-Patterson (2022), there are multiple concurrent and interlocking cycles in the assessment process. Currently, Danieley is in stage 1, “Departmental Educational and Operational Plans,” which you will recognize as our neighborhood plan (p. 65).

Over the summer, we will transition through stages 2 and 3, “Plan Evidence-Informed Strategies” and “Plan Measurement and Data Collection,” respectively (p. 65). You will notice that this will prepare us nicely to begin stage 4, “Implement Strategies and Measurements,” for the beginning of the 2023-2024 academic year in August 2023 (p. 65).

What are we seeing?

Being transparent with our data and related insights is important to us for a few reasons:

1. Evaluation. Sharing what we know allows us to reflect critically on what programs and services we offered and to make any changes that impact what we will continue to offer.
2. Accountability. Sharing what we know holds us accountable to providing the best programs and services possible. If we say we will make a change, you can trust that the change is data-driven.
3. Empowerment. Sharing what we know lets students know that we approach our work with a dynamic and humble spirit in tune with what students want and/or need. It lets students know that we are listening and acting, and it signals that we are co-creating their experience with them and not for them.

Winter and Spring 2023

With this in mind, here are selected data from Winter and Spring 2023 we want to foreground*:

• Winter and Spring 2023 programs/opportunities overview:
  • Total offered: 35 (average 2.5 per week)
  • Total educational programs: 23
  • Total social programs: 12
  • Total programs with campus or community collaborations: 19
• Winter/Spring 2023 programs/opportunities attendance:
  • Total attendance: 1,093 (average 31 per program)
  • Total individual Danieley residents who attended: 348 (52.89% of neighborhood total)
    • Overall, our resident engagement grew 8.51% from Fall 2022.
    • Overall, residents are generally attending programs in expected demographic rates with one exception:
      • Residents who identify as male are slightly more likely to attend than those who identify as female (6.02% more likely)
      • Residents who live in flats are significantly more likely to attend than those who live in apartments (30.56% more likely)
      • Residents who are incoming students (in their first year of college) are attending at the same rate as residents who are returning students (returning students are 0.41% more likely to attend)
    • Total individual Danieley residents who attended multiple times: 177 (50.86% of residents who attended)

2022-2023 (Fall, Winter, and Spring Together)

• 2022-2023 programs/opportunities review:
  • Total programs offered: 73 (average 2.6 per week)
  • Total educational programs: 42
  • Total social programs: 31
  • Total programs with campus or community collaborations: 26
• 2022-2023 programs/opportunities attendance:
  • Total attendance: 2,180 (average 30 per program)
    • Our total attendance grew by 234 residents from 2021-2022 programs (n=1,946)
  • Total individual Danieley residents who attended: 479 (70.86% of neighborhood average total [n=676])
    • Our total engagement with Danieley residents specifically decreased 6.56% from 2021-2022 (77.42% of neighborhood average total [n=682])
  • Overall, residents are generally attending programs in expected demographic rates with one exception:
    • Overall, residents who identify as female are slightly more likely to attend than those who identify as male (1.39% more likely)
      • In the 2021-2022 year, female residents were 32.39% more likely to attend than male residents.
    • Overall, residents who live in apartments are significantly more likely to attend than those who live in flats (21.52% more likely)
      • In the 2021-2022 year, apartment residents were 8.11% more likely to attend than flat residents.
    • Overall, residents who are incoming students (in their first year of college) are more likely to attend than those who are returning students (7.14% more likely).
      • In the 2021-2022 year, returning residents were 6.47% more likely to attend than incoming residents.
  • Total individual Danieley residents who attended multiple times: 303 (63.26% of residents who attended).
    • In the 2021-2022 year, 450 residents attended multiple times (or 85.23% of residents who attended).

What does it all mean?

There’s no perfect formula to capture the human experience in a data set or short article. However, we can infer meaning from the data points with longitudinal data sets for comparison.

You can see that our Danieley resident engagement grew 8.51% this semester compared to Fall 2022– wow! Even so, our engagement fell 6.56% from last year. Despite overall positive metrics elsewhere, our engagement numbers decreased.

So, what happened? Increased numbers from the 2021-2022 may have been the result of the pandemic. Fall 2021 and Winter 2022 saw the pandemic in full effect, and many of our programs were designed to be quicker and door-deliverable. Once pandemic restrictions lifted, it could be that residents resumed regular activities and extracurricular involvements, which also meant they were in Danieley less. We would need to explore this phenomenon more to better understand it.

Another explanation could be in the semantics. You can see that our total attendance numbers actually grew by 12.02% from last year– it’s our Danieley-specific attendance that decreased by 6.56%. This indicates we’re engaging campus-wide, which is certainly an intriguing surprise! Danieley programs tend to see Colonnades and off-campus residents most. It leads us to wonder how we can work with other neighborhoods in the future while also doubling-down on our own.

You can see that the female-male, apartment-flat, and incoming-returning ratios tend to flip-flop, though as time goes on, it will be interesting to note the salient themes. So far, it’s clear that our apartment residents tend to engage more frequently.

What the data won’t necessarily show us, though, is the intimate and meaningful relationships we’ve formed with residents and student staff this year. Though our repeat resident numbers have decreased, our mentorships and relationships have strengthened. As a personal note as Community Director– what an incredible community we had this year. Our residents were so willing to be in conversation with us, and our student staff culture was tight-knit. Just when we got to know our residents as our Danieley Neighborhood locals, they’re gone and graduated– but, we know they’ll come back for programs and chats (they’ve told us so!).

What will we do with what we learned?

In our 2022-2023 neighborhood plan, we declared four goals based on our observations from the 2021-2022 academic year. Our achievements in goal 1is marginal, though our achievement in goal 2 is significant. Our decrease in repeat engagement is unfortunate, though undocumented in this statistic is the increase in quality connections we feel we have made with our returning residents!

• To increase incoming student engagement
  • Our incoming student engagement grew by 0.67%
• To increase male resident engagement
  • Our male resident engagement grew by 7.45%
• To increase repeat resident engagement
  • Our repeat resident engagement fell by 21.97%
• To establish a living learning community (LLC)
  • We will revisit this goal once the 2030 Residential Campus Plan is complete

Based on our observations and on what the data are telling us, our new goals for the 2023-2024 academic year are:

• To increase incoming student engagement
  • To be transparent, our gains were marginal in this area. We know we need to be more intentional with this population, who noted feeling isolated in Danieley from other first-year peers in other neighborhoods and who also explicitly are looking for first-year friends. With Danieley’s first-year population expected to triple in Fall 2023, we will be committing to create a quality first-year experience for our residents.
• To increase male resident engagement
  • We’ve been hard at work creating a better connection with our male residents. In 2021-2022, female residents were significantly more likely to engage with us than their male peers; in 2022-2023, female and male engagement was almost equal. We want to continue to create meaningful opportunities for our male residents in the upcoming year.
• To implement quality measures
  • Over the past two years, we’ve built an infrastructure dedicated to collecting and evaluating quantitative data points like attendance numbers and survey responses. We know we can go broad and get folks engaged– now we want to go deeper and understand their experiences with being engaged. We want to personalize our assessment efforts and get students talking with us more about their experience in Danieley.
• To establish LLC presence
  • Our final goal remains the same: we want LLCs in Danieley! Our proposal process unfortunately has hit snags along the way, but we remain committed to establishing LLC presence in Danieley. Why? Because the peer-reviewed AND Elon-produced data all point to the positive impact LLCs have for students.

References

Strine-Patterson, H. (2022). Assessment is a leadership process: The multilevel assessment process. New Directions for Student Services, 2022, 61-76. doi: 10.1002/ss.20429

*All data collection has been reviewed and approved by Elon University’s Institutional Review Board.