Do Learning Communities Discourage Binge Drinking?

Abstract

W E KNOW that binge drinking remains a major problem on our campuses.What we don't know is what causes students to binge.Without this understanding, our approaches to addressing the problem can only be superficial. Recently,Aaron M. Brower, Kenneth Bruffee, and William Zeller investigated how students' living-learning environment affects their drinking behavior.They have come away with insights into what contributes to binge drinking among students and what discourages it. To learn more about what they have discovered, Charles Schroeder recently engaged in an e-mail roundtable discussion with Brower, Bruffee, and Zeller. LEARNING COMMUNITIES DISCOURAGE BINGE DRINKING ? D O CHARLES SCHROEDER: Bill and Aaron, you both have recently conducted research on the relationship between binge drinking and students' residential circumstances. What did you find out? Did anything surprise you? BILL ZELLER: Each of the two studies we recently conducted at Michigan-one by Carol Boyd, the other by Cherry Danielson-found significant differences in binge drinking behaviors between students who were in living-learning programs and those who were not. The finding that surprised me most was that students in living-learning programs were drinking as often as their peers but were binge drinking at significantly lower levels.This finding strengthened my supposition that living-learning environments may actually be manifesting healthier and more educationally beneficial student behaviors. AARON BROWER: Our research also showed that students in the learning communities drank just about as much students did on the rest of our campus.The big difference, though, between the learning community students and those living in other residence halls was that the learning community students did not experience the effects of their own or others' drinking at anywhere near the same degree as the rest of students on campus.What I mean is that the learning community students did not feel sexually or physically harassed or assaulted by others like students who live in other residence halls did, and the level of vandalism and disruption to sleep and study were much, much lower in the learning communities than in the other halls. In fact, my biggest surprise in these studies was how powerfully protective the learning community was. Even though UW-Madison has one of the highest binge drinking rates in the country, learning community students were affected by others' drinking at the same rates as students who attend colleges where drinking is in the lowest third of the country. SCHROEDER: Why do you think learning communities reduce students' alcohol use and misuse? Are there specific aspects of the learning community experience that account for these results? ZELLER: I have a couple of hypotheses.The first is that students who form social groups with peers who have a common academic link have different social interactions from students who socialize with peers who are not connected academically. The nature of the interactions students have must be influenced ...