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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

spiritual teaching, relational teaching, student learning, BYU

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Psychology

Abstract

According to the mission and aims of Brigham Young University, one of the outcomes of a BYU experience should be that it is spiritually strengthening. BYU is not alone in desiring this kind of experience. A faculty and student survey collected by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) (Lindholm, Szelényi, Hurtado, & Korn, 2005) found that perhaps up to 80 percent of students nationwide have an interest in spirituality and almost half say that it is “essential” that colleges encourage the personal expression of spirituality. Unfortunately, only 30 percent of faculty nationwide agree that colleges should be concerned with facilitating student ‘spiritual development.” Even at BYU, Wilkins and Birch (2011) found that the faculty were unsure of how to implement spirituality into their teaching and worried that doing so might lead to less critical thinking and lower academic rigor. In response to the first concern, Wilkins and Birch also found three main factors that students felt were important to implementing spirituality into learning: 1) Focus on your journey and how spirituality is working in your personal and professional life (Personal Journey). 2) Focus on intellectual connections between spirituality, discipline, and student’s lives (Intellectual Connections). 3) Focus on your relationship with students (Interpersonal). In this study, we set out to experimentally test these factors and respond to the concern of lowering academic rigor. We hypothesized that: 1) Teachers can be trained to incorporate the three areas of focus into their teaching. 2) As teachers incorporate these factors into their teaching students’ perceptions of teaching and learning quality will improve. 3) Emphasizing these factors in teaching will significantly improve students’ retention of the material taught.

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