AERA 2023 poster: Engagement and Satisfaction of Nonreligious Students

Poster session · American Educational Research Association · Chicago, April 2023

The interactive poster of the same research, presented at the AERA annual meeting alongside the paper. It is still online at the conference platform, with a two minute video where I walk through it.

What the poster shows

• The gap. Research on religion in college has looked almost entirely at religious students, while students with no religious affiliation became close to half of the incoming cohorts.
• The frame. Astin’s Input-Environment-Outcome model, used here for the first time to ask whether religious affiliation changes the college experience.
• The data. 16,148 seniors from 141 institutions in the HERI-UCLA cooperative survey, analysed with factor analysis, t-tests and structural equation modelling.
• The result. Unaffiliated students were less engaged and less satisfied on nearly every measure, with effect sizes from negligible to medium, and no difference in grades.
• What follows for practice. Ceremonies, counselling, funding and representation that already exist for religious groups, extended to the students who have no religion.

The question the poster leaves open

Surveys record what a student believes and almost never how much that belief matters to them. Separating the two gives four kinds of student, and the interesting suspicion is that what predicts how college goes is how much the worldview matters, not which worldview it is.

Four kinds of student: what they believe, crossed with how much it matters to them. Drawn for this page from the matrix in the poster. The study’s own data cannot tell these four apart, which is part of the point.

Open the poster at the AERA platform