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Our study was designed to investigate the longitudinal trajectories of student leader development capacities in a sample of students enrolled in multiple leadership-focused courses across several semesters. Our goal was to assess the degree to which course enrollment was associated with growth over the time that students engage as undergraduates in academic leadership programs, and if so, to assess the shape and speed of capacity change.

We utilized a multilevel intra-individual modeling approach assessing students’ motivation to lead, leader self-efficacy, and leadership skills across multiple data collection points for students in a campus major or minor focused on leadership studies. We compared an unconditional model, a fixed effect model, a random intercept model, a random slope model, and a random slope and intercept model to determine the shape of score trajectories. Our approach was not to collect traditional pre-test and post-test data – choosing to collect data only at the beginning of each semester – to reduce time cues typically inherent within pre-test and post-test collections.

Our results strongly suggested that individual students differ greatly in the degree to which they report the capacity to lead when initially enrolling in their first class. Surprisingly, the various models were unable to predict a pattern of longitudinal leader development through repeated course enrollment in our sample.

Our investigation employed statistical methods that are not often utilized in leadership education quantitative research, and also included a data collection effort designed to avoid a linear pre-test/post-test score comparison.

This study analyzed three years of data from the Collegiate Leadership Competition to investigate potential differences in longitudinal leader self-efficacy growth between students who identify as men and those who identify as women.

Survey design.

Results indicate that women participants enter their competition experience at higher levels of leader self-efficacy than men and that both groups were able to sustain moderate levels of growth measured several months after the end of the competition.

The gap between men and women in their leader self-efficacy did not change over the several months of measurement. Implications for leadership educators are discussed.

We highlight three approaches for structuring data analysis to aid leadership educators and researchers in investigating differences between populations, considering the variable of age.

Utilizing real data, we exemplify the three approaches to illustrate how insights might be gained.

We offer illustrative empirical findings in this reflective essay to demonstrate the three approaches. Our empirical examples are real, but not designed to be the purpose of this essay.

We provide three methodological approaches to analyzing leadership data that can assist leadership educators and researchers in determining an appropriate method for meaning-making with their data.

We seek to describe three different approaches to data analysis that are likely accessible and convenient as well as could lead to insight for leadership educators and researchers.

Postsecondary institutions that purport to build leaders are ubiquitous. Yet, given such ubiquity, the curriculum and co-curriculum dedicated to student leadership development is diffuse as an overall field of practice and lacks firm grounding in matching consensus outcomes for leader development to specific principles of teaching and learning. We propose a conceptual model for leader development of undergraduates that describes what leadership education should strive to accomplish.

Recent scholars (Leroy et al., 2022) suggest such lack of consensus and weak structure stems from a lack of commitment to defining the ultimate goals for leader development programs, matching curriculum and pedagogy to meet these goals, and then rigorously evaluating programs. Our proposed model illustrates a structure of leadership skill mastery founded in adult constructive development theory, applies a range of adult learning principles, and includes several suggestions for specific curricular and pedagogical applications. We describe each aspect of this conceptual model and explain how it might be enacted and assessed across diverse postsecondary contexts.

We have no findings to report.

Numerous scholars have advanced models that seek to define and provide a structure for “leadership.” The novelty of our work is to combine the work of other scholars to provide an explicit framework for the work of leadership education in higher education – how to conceptualize “leader development,” how to combine such development with adult learning principles, and what specific curricular and pedagogical elements should be included to achieve intended ends.

This project represents an exploratory qualitative investigation of the connection between undergraduate students’ experiences of positive emotions in academic leadership courses and their self-reports of leadership learning.

Our research team conducted a qualitative analysis of 298 post-course survey comments from students in academic courses focused on leader development over three academic years. These surveys included prompts inviting students to report dominant emotions they repeatedly felt within the classroom environment and how these salient emotions helped or hindered their learning over the course of the semester.

Our results suggest a complex interplay between the ways students’ self-reported experience of positive emotions during a leadership class influenced their leadership learning and course engagement. Overall, student responses revealed positive emotions through their course engagement, with interest, joy and serenity/contentment being the most frequently reported positive emotions. Participants attributed these emotions to influencing their willingness to attend class, participate in class activities, deepen their learning about leadership topics and apply their leadership learning beyond the class.

Educational research has long shown that emotions are relevant to specific learning processes. However, this research has not yet been applied to leadership-focused classrooms. Our novel study focused on the connections between emotional reactions to leadership courses and student learning and was designed to help unlock the primary mechanisms by which young people learn to lead through formal academic coursework.

Our goals were to explore the pedagogies applied by instructors that supported Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) student learning in a leadership course and the leadership behaviors BIPOC students identified as being applicable after the course.

Through survey research and qualitative data analysis, three prominent themes emerged.

High-quality, purposeful pedagogy created opportunities for students to learn. Second, a supportive, interactive community engaged students with the instructor, each other and the course material to support participation in learning. As a result, students reported experiencing big shifts, new growth and increased confidence during their leadership courses.

We discuss our findings and offer specific recommendations for leadership educators to better support BIPOC students in their leadership courses and classrooms and for further research with BIPOC students.

New educators may feel overwhelmed by the options available for engaging students through classroom participation. However, it may be helpful to recognize that participatory pedagogical systems often have constructivist roots. Adopting a constructivist perspective, our paper considers three meta-practices that encourage student participation: designing activities, leading others, and assessing peers. We explored the consequences of these meta-practices for important student outcomes, including content knowledge, engagement, self-efficacy, sense of community, and self-awareness. We found that different meta-practices were associated with different combinations of outcomes. This discovery demonstrates the benefit of studying meta- practices so as to reveal the nuanced effects that may arise from pedagogical choices. In addition, an understanding of meta-practices can help leadership educators to be more discerning and intentional in their course designs.