Community Resources
Cultivating Character: A Toolkit for Assessing Virtues in College Students
As you continue to cultivate character in your community, we highly recommend regular virtue assessment for both students and staff. The toolkit linked above includes surveys, worksheets, and scripts which can assist in this process. Implementing annual assessments using the same virtue scales featured in this report will help track changes over time and identify areas for growth.
This report is from the longitudinal study conducted by Baylor University, titled The Role of Meta-Identity in Developing Moral Communities Within Higher Education. This study, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) and more commonly referred to as DC3 or Developing Character in College Communities, offers valuable insights into virtue development among college students. Over the course of the study (2022–2024), we collected data from 2,791 students across four timepoints, with 998 completing all timepoints. In our preliminary analysis of this large dataset, we find that, in general, college students do grow over the four timepoints in most of the virtues.