Background: Research shows that people benefit from having an internally defined belief system and identity to guide their decision-making rather than depending exclusively on external authorities to make choices. Less is known about what types of developmental experiences facilitate progression toward self-authorship, which is a way of being where a person depends on their internally defined beliefs to make decisions and direct their future. Purpose: This study examined an experiential education setting and the influence the setting had on high school students’ progression toward self-authorship. Methodology/Approach: We used Pizzolato’s open-ended Experience Survey and semi-structured interviews to examine aspects of self-authorship in high school students attending a semester-long experiential education program. Findings/Conclusions: We found students returning from their semester-long program focused on decisions that had a greater impact on their personally defined, long-term identity rather than immediate decisions. In addition, students showed growth in the three domains of self-authorship—epistemological, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The results could be attributed to the pedagogical approach of the experiential education program. Implications: Educators who seek to provide experiences that support self-authorship could implement developmentally effective practices situated in an experiential learning context.

During two decades of teaching, we have observed that writing students seem more emotionally honest when their writing class is accompanied by an outdoor recreation component. The ability to take perceived risks is important to both outdoor recreation and writing; thus, we postulated that confidence gained in taking risks in outdoor experiences might affect students' confidence in taking risks in their reflective writing. In this study, we applied Bandura's (1997) self-efficacy theory to two classes of writing students, one that included outdoor experience and one that did not. We examined whether participating in outdoor activities would increase the self-efficacy of risk taking in the experimental group and whether this growth of self-efficacy in outdoor contexts would be accompanied by increased self-efficacy of risk taking in writing personal essays. Findings indicated significantly more growth of self-efficacy scores pertaining to risk taking in the writing of students in the experimental group versus those in the control group.

Background: Experiential educators face difficulties assessing participants and programs because there are so many measurement tools to choose from, many measures have validity issues such as those based on self-reported data, objective tests may not adequately measure social or psychological outcomes, and tests in content disciplines often assess knowledge rather than skill in synthesis, analysis, or evaluation. Purpose: We hypothesized that an open-ended essay final would reliably measure individual growth, internalization of foundational threshold concepts in our disciplines, and the effectiveness of our outdoor, interdisciplinary program. Methodology/Approach: Student essays contained 36 student-generated concepts spread across our four disciplines (biology, writing, history, and recreation) which we compared with 20 threshold concepts from professional literature. Findings/Conclusions: Individual students identified about half of the concepts generated by the whole group, illustrating that their learning varied significantly. Our group identified 13 of the published threshold concepts. Students demonstrated comprehension of threshold concepts—foundational ways of seeing—as opposed to restatements of information from teachers’ lectures. Implications: Writing essays aids permanent cognitive and behavioral learning; coding responses to open-ended essay questions for threshold concepts can be a valuable tool for both individual student and program assessment in experiential education.

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