These items are on page 3 of
the instrument and represent students' views of important
aspects of their college's environment. The alpha coefficient
for these 11 items (including the two items on students'
overall satisfaction with college) is .84 (Table 1). The
intercorrelations range between .22 to .65, indicating
that all these dimensions of the college or university
environment are positively related. That is, the degree
to which an institution emphasizes spending time on academics
is not antithetical to providing support for academic
success or friendly, supportive relations with students
and faculty members. At the same time, most of the correlations
are low to moderate in strength, indicating that these
dimensions make distinctive contributions to an institution's
learning environment. Skewness and kurtosis indicators
are all in the acceptable range.
Principal components analysis of these items produced
three factors (Table 2) accounting for about 61% of the
total variance. The first factor, "student satisfaction
with college and quality of personal relations,"
is made up of five items. The second factor is labeled
"campus climate-social" and consists of four
items. The third factor is “campus climate-academic”
that consists of two items. Thus, students perceive that
their institution's environment has three related dimensions.
The first represents their level of satisfaction with
the overall experience and their interactions with others.
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second and the third are broad
constructs that reflect the degree to which students believe
the programs, policies and practices of their school are
supportive and instrumental in both social and academic
aspects in helping them attain their personal and educational
goals.
Summary.
The pattern of responses from first-year students and
seniors suggest the items are measuring what they are
supposed to measure. For example, one would expect seniors
to be,on average, more engaged in their educational pursuits
compared with first-year students. Seniors would be expected
to score higher on most College Activities items and reporting
that their coursework places more emphasis on higher order
intellectual skills, such as analysis and synthesis as
contrasted with memorization. Among the exceptions is
that seniors reported re-writing papers and assignments
less frequently than first-year students. This may be
because first-year students are more likely to take classes
that require multiple drafts of papers or because seniors
have become better writers during college and need fewer
drafts to produce acceptable written work. On the two
other items, both of which are related to interacting
with peers from different backgrounds, first-year students
and seniors were comparable.
Overall, the items on The Report
appear to be measuring what they are intended to measure
and discriminate among students in expected ways.
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