This article highlights the current state of "what we know we do not know" about student leadership development and suggests specific research agendas and program assessment methods. This article includes the practical description of how rigorous methods could be used to address these issues using examples for both researchers and…

The relative ubiquity of student leadership development programs in postsecondary education -- supported at over 2,000 unique institutions globally -- requires efforts to assess their outcomes commensurate with the investment made in them. This research study collected qualitative data from a group of 25 recently graduated undergraduate alumni who…

Co-curricular engagement in postsecondary education provides students with a breadth of opportunity for leadership-focused developmental experiences. However, few studies have qualitatively examined in detail how alumni describe years later how formal co-curricular involvement contributes to their development. Such lack of attention has resulted…

In this chapter, the authors review and critique the existing evidence supporting current leadership education pedagogical practices and their effects on student leadership development. They conclude with a series of suggestions for increasing deliberate practices in formal courses designed to improve leadership education.

We conducted a national study of the Collegiate Leadership Competition (CLC), which since inception in 2015, has included over 75 higher education institutions. The CLC brings students together in collaborative institution-based teams to compete with other teams in competitions to achieve goals and practice effective leadership skills. Our goal…

Numerous difficulties exist in employing psychometrically sound quantitative measures of leadership development that are both generalizable and brief. Here, we highlight our efforts in creating the Ready, Willing, and Able Leader (RWAL) Scale. This instrument of leadership capacity: (a) has been psychometrically validated for use with college…

In conducting a multi-disciplinary, multi-degree study of all 83 higher education accrediting organizations in the United States and the 605 academic programs associated with them, our goal was to uncover patterns in the presence of leadership and general workforce competencies identified within the stated learning outcomes employed by these…

This study followed 134 university students within a national sample for one or two years, from their initial participation in a LeaderShape Institute session. We examined the shape of their trajectories of leadership growth over this course of time, with particular focus on development long after the session had ended. We also investigated the…

The Collegiate Leadership Competition (CLC) is a fast-growing tool for post-secondary student leadership development. There, teams practice with a coach for several months, then compete against teams from other institutions to win competitions based on achieving outcomes and demonstrating effective leadership practices (e.g., authentic…

Student organizations have existed for almost as long as educational institutions have. This chapter examines the historical role of student organizations in developing leadership capacity in students, as well as their current roles on high school and collegiate campuses in creating transformational environments for student leadership learning and…

The Student Leadership Competencies Inventory consists of eight scales, each corresponding to its relevant leadership construct within the Student Leadership Competencies framework (Seemiller, 2013). Due to the increasing use of the framework and associated inventory in leadership development programs in higher education, we conducted a thorough…

Existing leadership research focuses more on single experiences than the sustained application of skills beyond the formal leadership program. Using data from 124 college students who participated in a six-day leadership development program, this study used a four-phase longitudinal approach to examine influences on students' leadership capacity…

This exploratory study examined the motivation to lead of a random sample of 1,338 undergraduate students to determine the degree to which motivation to lead can predict leadership behaviors. Results suggested that students' internal self-identity as a leader positively predicted behavior, while their "social normative" motivation to…

Given the importance of leadership development within the various agricultural professions, a national sample (n = 461) of students with agriculture-related majors from 55 colleges was compared to a similarly-sized random peer group from the same institutions. The data were analyzed to compare the agricultural student sample to their peers with…

Research involving students (N=612) at a large, research-extensive university who participated in voluntary short-term leadership programs showed an increase in leadership capacity, even when measured three months later. A popular assessment tool, the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS), was used. Not all leadership competency scores…