REVISITING TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING OF MILLENNIAL COLLEGE- AGE SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STUDENTS VIA EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES

In summers of 2010 and 2012, UNF instructors took students to the Southwestern United States to study sustainable design as part of the UNF “Transformational Learning Opportunity” program. As part of the courses, customized learning communities were created at a variety of field locations and various assessment methodologies were used to determine the level of student engagement. During the 2010 post-course assessment, a new hybridized quantitative methodology was developed called “content analysis with stance indications” to assess the degree of transformational learning that took place for each student. Based upon the 2010 course and post-course assessment, improvements were incorporated into the course design. This paper discusses the revised course design, reviews the revised course experience, and measures student engagement using an adaptation of content analysis. The paper concludes with a comparison of the novel content analysis results from the two courses.