NSSE E-News is a periodic electronic newsletter created to keep NSSE users and others informed about current project activities.
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November 2011
NSSE Updates
Annual Results 2011 Released on November 17thNSSE 2.0 Instrument To Be Unveiled June 2012
Major Field Report Available for Download—Now With Customizable Majors!
Workshops
Webinar Series Update
Other NSSE Updates
Resources To Know AboutNew Staff
Spencer Update
Research in Brief
Research Honored by POD
Other Projects
BCSSE 2011 Wraps UpFSSE 2012 Registration – It’s Not Too Late!
Presenting FSSE Results
Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) Update
Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) Update
NSSE Updates
NSSE Annual Results 2011 Released on November 17th
NSSE’s Annual Results 2011: Fostering Student Engagement Campuswide was released on November 17. The report emphasizes the value of connecting NSSE results to specific campus programs and units and recommends sharing pertinent results widely to foster greater collaboration on the quality of the undergraduate experience. Results—based on responses from over 416,000 students attending 673 U.S. colleges and universities—include analysis of the time students in various major categories spent preparing for class, and presents findings from three sets of experimental questions—learning strategies, reading comprehension, and global awareness. As always, the report describes examples of how institutions use NSSE data and provides tables of summary statistics for the 2011 Benchmarks for Effective Educational Practice. Annual Results 2011 is available for download on the NSSE Web site.
NSSE 2.0 Instrument To Be Unveiled June 2012
After nearly three years of development work, we are closing in on our goal of a revised version of NSSE that will launch in 2013. In June 2012, following a second iteration of pilot testing and student interviews, the updated instrument will be unveiled.
Why change a successful survey? The short answer is that after a decade in the field, we know more about what matters to student success and institutional improvement efforts. We also know more about the NSSE survey itself. Many items will remain unchanged, but a good number will be modified, some will be added, and some will be deleted. One thing is for certain: NSSE’s signature focus on providing diagnostic and actionable information about effective educational practice will not change.
We continue to seek feedback from institutions about proposed changes to NSSE. Most recently, we talked with NSSE users at the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis. Upcoming events include the North East Association for Institutional Research annual conference in Boston this December.
We welcome ideas, comments, and questions about our development work. Contact us by e-mail (nsse2013@indiana.edu) or phone (812-856-5824). Visit the NSSE 2.0 Web page (nsse.iub.edu/nsse2013) for additional details and updates.
Major Field Report Available for Download—Now With Customizable Majors!
NSSE encourages institutions to closely examine their students’ experiences and the NSSE Major Field Report is a model of what such an analysis could look like. The NSSE Major Field Report disaggregates NSSE institutional results by up to eight categories of related majors and presents them alongside comparison group students in the same categories. This year institutions had the option to customize their major categories by regrouping the 85 student-reported majors to match their profile of degrees offered. The NSSE 2011 Major Field Report was made available to participating institutions this November through the Institution Interface.
NSSE Workshops
Tennessee Higher Education Commission NSSE Workshop, October 20, 2011
About 40 academic administrators, institutional research staff and student affairs professionals representing nine public institutions in Tennessee participated in a workshop hosted by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission and led by Bob Gonyea, NSSE Associate Director, and Louis Rocconi, NSSE Research Analyst. Bob presented Using Student Engagement Data focusing on different assessment approaches and longitudinal analysis. Lou presented Student Engagement in Tennessee Universities featuring data from TN institutions to illustrate various ways systems and institutions can use their NSSE data. Systems interested in hosting a workshop in their state are encouraged to contact Jillian Kinzie, jikinzie@indiana.edu.
Upcoming Workshops
Plans are underway to offer a NSSE workshop that will provide institutional teams (2-4 members) an opportunity to work closely with NSSE staff to deepen their data analysis and use of results. The workshop will be organized around a broad theme and institutions will be invited to develop proposals for extending their data analysis and use efforts. Full details will be available early in 2012. We also would appreciate your input on future workshop needs. Please send suggestions or comments to Jillian Kinzie, jikinzie@indiana.edu.
NSSE Webinar Series Update
Live and archived NSSE Webinar sessions have continued to attract a large number of participants. Since 2008, representatives from close to 900 unique institutions in the US and Canada have registered for at least one NSSE Webinar. Recorded Webinars in our archives have been viewed over 6,000 times. Over 2,000 participants have registered for Webinars since 2008 with many participating multiple times.
A new prerecorded Webinar presentation, The NSSE Pocket Guide, Student Experience in Brief, and Other Resources for Parents, Students, and Admissions Staff, is now available. This session explores a number of useful resources that NSSE provides for prospective students and parents as well as for campus use by admissions staff, for new faculty orientation, and in student life training. By viewing this Webinar, admissions and enrollment management staff will gain information about NSSE and learn more about useful reports like the Student Experience In Brief. NSSE participating institutions are encouraged to share this Webinar announcement with their admissions office staff.
nsse.iub.edu/webinars/archives.cfm
Other Recent Webinars Available for Viewing:
Using NSSE Data in Accreditation
NSSE's Accreditation Toolkits, designed for all regional and several specialized associations, articulate the requirements and standards for each accreditor with NSSE processes and items. The session shows how NSSE items map to accreditation standards, discusses the potential for using NSSE data in institutional self-studies and quality improvement plans, and explores ways colleges and universities have used their results in accreditation and to measure and monitor institutional effectiveness.
What to Expect if You Participate in NSSE
The presentation helps prepare new NSSE participants (and reacquaint returning contacts) to think ahead about the various phases of administering NSSE. Thinking strategically about the details of the NSSE administration is the first step in effectively using NSSE results on your campus.
Your NSSE Institutional Report 2011 - Step by Step
This Webinar walks users through the contents of the NSSE Institutional Report. A review of the various data reports and supporting materials contained in the Institutional Report, details concerning which data were used in the creation of particular reports and comparison groups, and general strategies for understanding helps you get the most out of your Institutional Report.
Student Engagement in the Professions
Using data from NSSE 2010, this Webinar explores patterns of student engagement in business, education, engineering, and health professions. The analyses focus on NSSE's benchmarks of effective educational practice and selected high-impact practices. The presentation also illustrates how NSSE's new Major Field Report can be used for similar comparative analyses at the institutional level.
All recordings are available in the NSSE Webinar Archives:
nsse.iub.edu/webinars/archives.cfm
We welcome your ideas for future Webinars. Please send your suggestions for topics to Jillian Kinzie, jikinzie@indiana.edu.
Other NSSE Updates
NSSE Resources To Know About
Displaying NSSE Results on Institution Web Sites
To date we have posted 18 institutional examples on our Web page: Examples of Institutional Web Sites that Display NSSE Results. These sites were selected for their adherence to basic standards of data representation and interpretation and are consistent with NSSE’s policy against rankings and with the guidelines for analyzing and interpreting results found in the Institutional Reports. We have created a document, Guidelines for Display of NSSE Results on Institution Web Sites, to aid personnel from institutional research, admissions, public relations, communications, Web development, and other areas to analyze and publicly display information that is accurate and intended for a general audience. The Guidelines document, which includes suggestions for appropriate and accurate display of NSSE results, provides examples and suggestions that foster increased transparency of NSSE results.
nsse.iub.edu/links/website_displays
Lessons from the Field Volume 2
A second volume of Lessons from the Field series will be released in January 2012. The first volume, Using NSSE to Assess and Improve Undergraduate Education: Lessons from the Field 2009, features illustrative institutional examples that exemplify the effective use of NSSE results and successful approaches for moving from data to action.
nsse.iub.edu/links/lessons
In High Demand: NSSE Pocket Guides
Requests from college admissions offices, high school counselors and non-profit educational organizations for A Pocket Guide to Choosing a College: Questions to Ask on Your College Visits, the NSSE guide to college exploration, continue to increase. Close to 100,000 copies of the English version, and 6,700 copies of the Spanish translation, have been sent out this past year. The NSSE pocket guide includes suggestions about questions to ask of key people students and parents will meet on their college visits –the tour guide, admissions staff, and currently enrolled students. To learn more about the pocket guide, we invite you to visit the NSSE Webinar archives and view the new Webinar listed in this e-news, The NSSE Pocket Guide, Student Experience in Brief, and Other Resources for Parents, Students, and Admissions Staff. To order free copies of the pocket guide, please visit the NSSE Web site.
New Staff
NSSE is pleased to announce that Amy Ribera joined the Center for Postsecondary Research as a research analyst in August. Amy is pursuing a Ph.D. in Higher Education and Student Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington and will complete her dissertation, “The Effect of Social Stratification on Deep Approaches to Learning of College Students,” this fall. Amy worked in the Center in several project associate roles starting in 2005, including years of outstanding service to FSSE and LSSSE. She also worked as a research assistant with the Office of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development with the IU School of Medicine. Amy earned a BA in chemistry and a MS Ed in higher education and student affairs from Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include faculty teaching practices, college student learning and development, and disciplinary cultures.
Spencer Update
This fall marked the final selection of eight case study institutions and the beginning of site visits for the Spencer Foundation funded project, Learning to Improve: A Study of Evidence-Based Improvement in Higher Education. The goal of the study is to document improvement processes that foster educational reform in higher education as well as lessons about “what works” in institutional change. The Learning to Improve section of the NSSE Web site (nsse.iub.edu/learningtoimprove) provides access to project documents, including a project overview, a sample institutional questionnaire, detailed description of NSSE measures used in analysis, and preliminary results shared at the AAC&U annual meeting in January 2011.
Research in Brief
NSSE Technology Initiatives
NSSE is working with EDUCAUSE to develop technology questions that may be added to the new NSSE survey instrument scheduled for release in 2013. In a community update session at the 2011 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Philadelphia, NSSE researchers invited attendees to help explore various approaches to asking about this content area.
Examining Effective Faculty Practice: Teaching Clarity and Student Engagement
A recent study explored the teaching clarity behaviors that students are exposed to and the extent to which these behaviors relate to student engagement, deep approaches to learning, and students’ self-reported developmental gains during college. Students who experienced clear teaching behaviors, such as explaining course goals and requirements, also had higher engagement scores across a range of measures. There were particularly strong relationships between students’ exposure to clear teaching behaviors and students’ sense of campus support and self-reports of gains.
Global Awareness and Student Engagement
Students frequently take globally focused coursework and have conversations about cultures other than their own, according to NSSE researchers. Students doing more of these activities also perceive their coursework to be more academically challenging and self-report greater gains in a variety of areas, particularly in areas of personal and social development such as in understanding other people and contributing to the welfare of the community.
College Readiness To Be Engaged
Traditional indicators of college readiness mainly focus on subject-specific high school academic preparation. However, these indicators do not reflect the students’ readiness to be meaningful engaged. A study presented at the 2011 AIR Annual Forum using BCSSE and NSSE data provided evidence that use of prior high school engagement as a predictor of future academic engagement has merit. The results support the importance of considering high school academic engagement as an indicator of college readiness to be engaged.
NSSE Research Honored by POD
NSSE staff, Allison BrckaLorenz, Eddie Cole, Jillian Kinzie, and Tony Ribera, received the Robert J. Menges Award for Outstanding Research in Educational Development for their session, "Examining Effective Faculty Practice: Teaching Clarity and Student Engagement," at the 36th annual Professional Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education conference in Atlanta, Georgia, October 26 - 30, 2011. The award is named in honor of Robert J. Menges, who was "an honored scholar, whose long years of work and contributions to teaching and learning and faculty development in higher education can be characterized by his spirit of caring consultation, active participation, and rigorous research." See the POD Web site for additional information about the organization and the award.
Other Projects
BCSSE 2011 Wraps Up
The BCSSE 2011 administration was a great success. Throughout the summer and early fall, more than 70,000 incoming first-year students at 135 institutions completed the BCSSE survey. Each of these institutions received the BCSSE Institutional Report 2011, as well as student-level advising data. Many of these BCSSE 2011 institutions will also participate in NSSE 2012 and receive a BCSSE 2011-NSSE 2012 Combined Report. The combined report contains two sections: cross-sectional and longitudinal. The cross-sectional results include side-by-side frequencies from all BCSSE and NSSE respondents allowing for easy comparisons. The longitudinal results portray the matched data from those first-year students who completed both BCSSE in the previous summer/fall and NSSE. These matched results allow one to focus on environmental factors that may influence the nature and frequency of student engagement in various areas during the first year of college. To see aggregate BCSSE results, or combined BCSSE-NSSE results, click here.
BCSSE 2012 registration is scheduled to open in early March.
For additional information about registration or general information about the project, visit our Web site (bcsse.iub.edu), e-mail us (bcsse@indiana.edu), or call our toll-free number (866-435-6773).
FSSE 2012 Registration – It’s Not Too Late!
Though the deadline to register for the Spring 2012 FSSE administration has passed, it is not too late to register. Institutions still wishing to participate may complete a waitlist registration form. The registration form will ask institutions to provide the estimated number of faculty to be invited to complete the survey, as well as contact information for institutional NSSE/FSSE representatives. In order to participate in FSSE 2012, an institution must either be registered for NSSE 2012 or have recently administered NSSE on their campus. Please contact us at fsse@indiana.edu or call 812-856-5824 if you have questions.
Presenting FSSE Results
To assist institutions with showcasing their own FSSE findings, downloadable SPSS syntax is available on the FSSE Topical Findings tab. The syntax allows institutions to produce findings on various topics that may be used to spark conversations regarding faculty practices and perceptions on your campus.
Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) Update
LSSSE staff recently published a paper that investigates how law students develop a sense of professional identity and purpose. The findings point to the importance of law school classes for learning about legal ethics, and to the role of clinical legal education as a means for deepening the effectiveness of lessons about ethics, professional identity and purpose.
Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) Update
In September 2011, the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) launched its first national administration. Invitations were sent to over 200,000 arts alumni from 66 institutions across the country and in Canada. The 2011 survey closes in mid-November, and Institutional Reports will be distributed to participating schools in early spring.
SNAAP is a research project designed to investigate the educational experiences and career paths of arts graduates nationally. It provides the findings to educators, policymakers, and philanthropic organizations to improve arts training, inform cultural policy, and support artists. SNAAP respondents come from a wide-range of artistic disciplines and represent graduates of arts-focused schools, liberal arts colleges, schools or departments within comprehensive universities, as well as arts high schools. The SNAAP survey is the only one of its kind, and the SNAAP data source is the largest ever assembled on the outcomes of arts education in North America.
Registration for SNAAP 2012 opens in February. For more information about SNAAP or to find out how you can participate in SNAAP 2012, please visit the SNAAP Web site or contact Sally Gaskill or Scott Jones at snaap@indiana.edu or 812-856-5824