Scientific Integrity in Action: A Commitment to Rigorous Research and Innovation

Phase I: 2010-2020

In our first decade, operating under the name Global Citizen Year, we offered students an 8-month, in-person Fellowship experience at a collection of sites across the world. During this period, our research and evaluation strategies were nascent: we collected post-program survey data from students to assess their perceived growth in various outcomes. Many of the survey prompts and indexes were developed in-house. We also conducted cross-sectional studies with our alumni each year and published findings from these surveys. In our Fellowship Alumni Report, alumni reported that the program helped them grow in self confidence, agency, empathy, and sense of purpose, while also inspiring a commitment to equity and proactive civic engagement.

Phase II: 2020-2022

During the pandemic, we transitioned from in-person immersive educational experiences to offering a fully virtual program, the Global Citizen Year Academy, to a global student base. We also hired a Director of Research and Evaluation and engaged with an external researcher from Harvard Business School to help us begin to assess program effects more rigorously by conducting quasi-experimental studies, using a repeated measures design. This approach allowed us to track Academy students’ objective growth in our core outcomes of interest over time. Each outcome was measured using a published, validated index aligned with the standard definition of the outcome. 

We found that our students grew by a statistically significant margin, in their sense of self, global orientation, and mental health and wellbeing. Additionally, students were more prepared to enter and maximize their college experience following their participation in the Academy. These results remained consistent even when compared to a matched control group. According to Harvard’s analysis, students who participated in the Academy reported statistically greater positive change in many of the measured outcomes compared to the matched group of students who did not participate.

Phase III: 2023-Present

In 2023, we launched our newest program: Take Action Lab (TAL). TAL is rooted in our curricular model, with an expectation that students will grow in a variety of outcome areas that support their efforts to be effective changemakers: self awareness, well-being, sense of agency, interrelatedness, global perspective-taking, and empathy.  

To date, we (in partnership with researchers from Harvard University and UC Berkeley) have conducted a repeated measures study (with retrospectives) with each term of students, while testing a variety of valid and reliable indexes that have been aligned with our internal definitions of each of our outcomes of interest. We struggled to find an index that measures global perspective-taking (one of our key outcomes of interest) in a way that was aligned to our internal definition. To fill this critical need, we developed our own measure, detailed in this internal White Paper.

Harvard Study

In partnership with an external research team from Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science’s Human Flourishing Program, we studied TAL’s impact during the first term of programming. Harvard’s analysis confirmed the impact of our design and found statistically significant improvements in our students in the following areas:

• Wellbeing
• Meaning + Purpose
• Self-Awareness
• Self-Actualization
• Interrelatedness
• Close Social Relationships

Some of this growth was observed after just the four-week virtual Foundations Course, indicating that it alone has potential for impact. 

Since that first term, we have studied impact internally and found that students grow by a statistically significant margin in self-awareness, self-actualization, wellbeing, close social relationships, interrelatedness, global perspective taking, and empathy. Results from these analyses were recently published in the Intercultural Connector (June 2024). We have also found that our students grow in leadership competencies of adaptability, resilience, and open-mindedness.

UC Berkeley Studies

We partnered with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley to design and run a combination of studies to support our understanding of program impact.  

In 2024, these researchers administered a cross-sectional study that included a control group. Researchers surveyed all Tilting Futures alumni across our three programs and all students who applied to be in one of these programs, met our internal selection criteria, but were not selected to participate due to space constraints. They found that individuals who graduated from Tilting Futures programs reported statistically more self-awareness and interrelatedness than control students. Specifically, compared to their matched peers, Tilting Futures’ alumni outperformed their matched peers in having: 

• A better understanding of themselves and their cultural foundations.
• Stronger sense of membership and commitment to the global community.
• Reduced prejudicial attitudes.
• Higher likelihood of pursuing careers that create positive social impact in the world.
  

In Fall 2025, UC Berkeley researchers will begin collecting data to support their cross-site experimental study of our Take Action Lab.  The study results, expected in summer 2027, will provide insights into program impact and its generalizability across program sites and curricular focuses.