Report: Bradley Learning Community making an impact

The report cards are in: Bradley Learning Community is getting high marks for enhancing the academic and social lives of UW–Madison freshmen.

Top, students hug after a house meeting of the Bradley Learning Community. The program is getting high marks for enhancing the academic and social lives of UW–Madison freshmen. Middle, residents check email from their rooms. Bottom, Aaron Brower, a social work professor and faculty fellow with Bradley, keeps office hours and makes social contact with students at the hall.

See also: Key findings from the year’s end report on the Bradley Learning Community

A new year’s-end report of Bradley offers early evidence that the learning community is making a difference with students in its first three years. The study, which compared Bradley’s 240 residents with freshmen at large, found that Bradley students earned slightly higher grades, dropped out less frequently, participated more in campus life, studied longer and drank alcohol less than their peers.

“The net effect is that Bradley’s culture is the one we hoped to see,” says Aaron Brower, a social work professor and faculty fellow with Bradley. “These are students who are instilling more meaning into their lives and their education.”

Bradley opened in fall 1995 as the first modern “learning community” at UW- Madison, with the goal of making connections between a student’s academic and social life. Most notably, Bradley has a dozen faculty fellows who keep office hours, teach classes and make social contact with students at the hall. Peer learning partners, who serve as mentors for students and spearhead social and volunteer events, have replaced house fellows.

Students also have an array of ways to get involved at Bradley, with student- directed activities ranging from environmental clubs to dances to formal study groups. In 1997-98, a total of 248 such activities were generated at Bradley, about 15 per week.

Brower says the report attempted to measure Bradley’s performance by comparing several sources of data, including the Student Connection Survey of about 1,000 new students; and information from the Office of the Registrar and the Division of Housing.

Since students choose to live in Bradley, the report addressed whether students did better because of Bradley, or because of the talents and values they brought with them to college. A freshman class profile shows that the high school grades of Bradley students average roughly the same as the entire class. And the Student Connections Survey found that Bradley students, compared to the freshman class, reported similar expectations for their first year.

Brower says the results, especially those related to drinking, suggest that decidedly different norms for behavior have taken root at Bradley. “What’s really miraculous about Bradley is we essentially start over every year with new freshmen,” he says. “Every year is a promise that students will ‘become Bradley.’ They chuckle at that idea at first, but it happens.”