Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Hevel, Michael S. and Daniel A. Bureau. "Research-Driven Practice in Fraternity and Sorority Life." New Directions for Student Services, vol. 2014, no. 147, Fall2014, pp. 23-36. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/ss.20098.

Greek life at Universities in America is a very polarizing subject. Most people either agree and like it or they disagree with it and would prefer to see it gone. Despite this there was not a lot of research about whether or not these organizations help the academic development of the students involved or harm their academic development. This could be a result of some fraternal members being hesitant to find out whether or not their organization actually helps or harms the academic development of the students involved. The Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts education (WNS) did do a study recently about this. The results that was found before this study was fraternity involvement in associated with a lower gpa on average in the first year of college. Sorority membership has no significant influence. However, by the third year of college fraternity life did not have an influence on gpa and neither did sorority involvement. When WNS did their study they found that there was no direct academic impact on gpa that fraternities and sororities had. However, they did find two interesting things. The first is that white students had a lower expected level of critical thinking if they were involved in greek life. The second is that students who entered college with a low critical thinking skill had a significantly lower critical thinking score. When studying the moral reasoning in greek affiliated students and non-greek affiliated students the WNS found that there was no significant difference between their moral reasoning. In a study on cultural competence between the two groups the WNS concluded that there is no significant influence on intercultural compitance in 2011. This challenged previous studies conducted in the 1990’s that showed a low level of intercultural competence in greek life. When the WNS studied the effects of Leadership in students it was found that greek life displayed a larger competence towards leadership.