Considering joining the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL)?

(this is s a draft of an article for ACPA's Commission on Assessment and Evaluation's June newsletter.)

Founded at the University of Maryland, the MSL came about to help (a) enable educators to enhance their leadership development initiatives, and (b) provide benchmarking data to help improve practice. It is administered on multiple campuses and identifies environmental features that contribute most to leadership outcomes.

The principal investigators are Dr. John P. Dugan (Loyola University Chicago), Dr. Susan R. Komives (University of Maryland), and Dr. Julie E. Owen (New Century College at George Mason University), and in the 2006 administration, over 60,000 respondents participated from 52 institutions, making it one of the largest studies of college student leadership.

The MSL uses the revised Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS-R2), based on the Social Change Model of Leadership (SCML), and featuring 8 core values:



This model of leadership is based in a context of facilitating social change; thus the scale may not measure all aspects of leadership across the varied contexts in which leadership takes place. Nonetheless, MSL staff report that many campuses that do not use the SCML still found the results useful.

The reliability and construct validity of the SRLS-R2 instrument, based on the MSL 2006 administration, is adequate, with Cronbach's Alpha values ranging from .77 to .83 for individual scales; however a comprehensive understanding of the instrument’s validity is difficult without other measures of validity (i.e. concurrent, predictive, convergent, etc.). This is more or less important depending on the inferences drawn from the data; nonetheless, the MSL is still a useful instrument as the 2006 results show.

Different schools have used the SRLS and MSL in different ways. Trinity College used the SRLS to evaluate the effectiveness of a single program, measuring pre-post scores of all 11 participants, and showing changes in mean with no comparison to other groups.

Drake University used the MSL to evaluate the overall effectiveness of their leadership development efforts, reporting statistics comparing first year, junior and senior students groups, regardless of involvement in leadership programs. Clear and significant differences between class cohorts were found resulting from either their involvement or simple maturation.

An exemplary model is UC Berkley’s approach, using MSL data to compare pre-post scores related to individual programs with overall campus averages, thus providing a reference point with which to interpret the program’s impact. They also engaged a deep qualitative analysis of related artifacts (reflection papers, portfolios, etc.), and they were able to (with IRB approval) match individual MSL data with internal assessments. This resulted in a tremendously rich and deep understanding of the impact of their programs.

The 2012 MSL includes several new features:

• New "MSL Insight Reports": User-friendly, strategically targeted reports designed to facilitate the translation of MSL results to practice on individual campuses.
• Direct communication between MSL Researchers and participant calls to help interpret results.
• The survey has been shortened and refined to improve reliability and validity of measures.

For more information on the MSL, SRLS, or the Social Change Model of Leadership, visit the following websites:

MSL - http://www.leadershipstudy.net/
SRLS - http://www.srlsonline.org/