This section includes the 22
items on the first page of The
Report that represent activities in which students
engage inside and outside the classroom. The vast majority
of these items are expressions of empirically derived
good educational practices; that is, the research shows
they are positively correlated with many desired outcomes
of college. The exceptions are the item about coming to
class unprepared and the two items about information technology
that have yet to be empirically substantiated as good
educational practice. Items from some other sections of
The Report also are conceptually
congruent with these activities, such as the amount of
time (number of hours) students spend on a weekly basis
participating in various activities (studying, socializing,
working, extra- curricular involvements).
As expected, the "coming to class unprepared"
(CLUNPREP) item was not highly correlated with the other
21 College Activities (CA) items. To facilitate psychometric
and other data analyses this item was reverse scored and
the reliability coefficient (Cronbach's alpha) for the
22 CA items was .85 (Table 1). Except for the CLUNPREP
item, the intercorrelations for the CA items range from
0.09 to 0.68. Most of the lowest correlations are associated
with the "coming to class unprepared" item and
the item about rewriting a paper several times. Those
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most highly correlated in
this section include the four faculty-related items: “discussed
grades or assignments with an instructor,” “talked
about career plans with a faculty member or advisor,”
“discussed ideas from your readings or classes with
a faculty member outside of class” (FACIDEAS) and
“received prompt feedback from faculty on your academic
performance (written or oral)” (FACFEED).
Principal components analysis of the 22 CA items with
oblique rotation produced four factors accounting for
about 45% of the variance in student responses (Table
2). The factors are mindful of such principles of good
practice as faculty-student interaction, peer cooperation,
academic effort, and exposure to diverse views. As intended,
the underlying constructs of engagement represented by
the 22 CA items are consistent with the behaviors that
previous research has linked with good educational practice.
The skewness and kurtosis estimates for the CA items are
generally acceptable, indicating that responses to the
individual CA and related items are relatively normally
distributed. One noteworthy exception is the “participating
in a community-based project as part of a regular course”
which was markedly positively skewed as about 66% answered
"never.” |
