Volume 5, Issue 2 February 2006

NSSE 2006 Launches Seventh Year of Student Engagement Partnership
Hot tip: Using the Institution Interface to manage your survey administration
By the Numbers
Webcasts on Using NSSE Data Planned for Spring 2006
NSSE Workshop Goes East!
NSSE Roadshow
Featured School
NSSE in the News

NSSE 2006 Launches Seventh Year of Student Engagement Partnership

Beginning Monday, January 30, the first of nearly 970,000 undergraduate students at 560 schools in the United States and Canada will receive an invitation to participate in NSSE. The effort to study and improve undergraduate educational experiences continues to mature with each successive administration as a result of the partnership between institutions and the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research.

This maturation is not simply a matter of numbers. The complexity of survey administration increases each year as the NSSE staff seeks ways to meet unique needs of different institution types while maintaining consistency in areas where it matters. Changes to the design of our Institution Interface, new timelines for consortium and oversampling registration, and new procedures for handling updates to student samples are just a few of the initiatives undertaken this year in response to feedback from schools.

As institutions dig more deeply into their data and apply the lessons learned to policy and practice, NSSE is also better able to provide other participants with ideas on how the data might guide their own efforts to develop quality undergraduate education. NSSE continues to develop better ways to catalog applications of NSSE data and develop shared resources for participating schools.

Moving into the survey administration period, we encourage both new and seasoned NSSE users to suggest ways to improve the quality and utility of our various activities, products, and services. Please write us at nsse@indiana.edu.

Hot tip: Using the Institution Interface to manage your survey administration

Each year we attempt to make the Institution Interface more user-friendly as well as a helpful survey management tool. The Survey Administration page has several useful links to help you throughout the administration process.

The “View mailing schedule and processed materials” link allows you to see processed versions of each letter/message that will be sent to your students as well as their expected mailing schedule. Knowing your mailing dates allows you to give students advance notice of NSSE, a proven method of boosting response rates.

Throughout the survey administration you will want to use the “View disposition summary and response rate” link to monitor the progress of your students’ responses. Since we update the page daily, you can track your response rates, monitor which students have completed the survey, and determine which students you might need to contact directly. We encourage a proactive approach to boost completions early in the process.

By using the link “View processed image,” you can see the NSSE welcome page as your students will when they begin the survey. This page provides basic information about NSSE and is the informed consent document students review prior to proceeding to the survey.

If you need to update an individual student’s information, the “View and update processed population” link allows you to search by name or ID number. If numerous records need updating, prepare and upload an Excel file with your changes, including the students’ ID numbers and names.

Please explore the Survey Administration page on the Institution Interface to see all the applications available to assist you. We’re confident that proper use of these tools will maximize the success of your administration.

By the Numbers

The 2006 administration of NSSE will once again break our own record for the number of schools participating during any one administration. We currently have 560 schools registered for NSSE 2006, up from 2005’s record number of 529. In addition, our gross sample size will be around 970,000 students this year.

Figure 1 shows the growth of NSSE participating institutions since 2002. 113 (around 20%) of this year’s group are first-time NSSE participants, which is comparable to the proportion of first-time users in years past. 255 institutions that participated in 2005 are participating again this year.

Consortium participation remains strong, with 253 schools participating in one of 20 different consortia or state/university systems. Ontario Universities, South Dakota Public Universities, Tennessee Publics, and University of Wisconsin are participating as systems this year, in addition to a wide variety of groups ranging from the third year of the American Democracy Project, to Urban Universities, and the AAC&U Bringing Theory to Practice Project, among others.

Webcasts on Using NSSE Data Planned for Spring 2006

Would you like to learn more about your NSSE data and do it in the comfort of your office on your computer? The NSSE Institute plans to host a series of Web presentations on using NSSE data for current and prospective NSSE participants in the spring of 2006. Using Indiana University’s new Breeze online meeting and presentation software, NSSE staff will present live sessions on topics such as:

• An introduction to NSSE data for institutional researchers and administrators who are new NSSE users
• Strategies for veteran NSSE users who want a deeper understanding of their survey data
• Ideas and tips on using NSSE data for assessment, accreditation and quality improvement plans
• Strategies for sharing NSSE data with campus stakeholders

We welcome you to submit ideas for future sessions. Please send your suggestions to: nsse@indiana.edu or to Kathy Anderson, NSSE Institute Project Manager, kanderso@indiana.edu.

Users accessing the Web site URL for the presentation will be able to email questions to the presenter via an online text chat during the session. Each presentation is tentatively scheduled to run for one hour. The presentation will also be recorded and archived on the NSSE Institute Web site for asynchronous viewing.

We will send an email to NSSE participants in late January-early February with specific dates and times. An announcement will also be posted to the NSSE Web site. We hope you can join us!

NSSE Workshop Goes East! 2006 Fall Regional Users Workshop To be Held at Southern Connecticut State

The NSSE Institute and Southern Connecticut State University will co-host the 2006 Fall Regional NSSE Users Workshop on Thursday and Friday, October 19-20, 2006, in New Haven, Connecticut. Online registration and more detailed workshop information will be available in late spring-early summer on the NSSE Web site. We know how busy your schedules are, so we’re providing this information to help you plan your conference and workshop schedules.

Workshops are designed to allow institutional researchers, faculty, administrators and staff an opportunity to gain ideas for using NSSE data from both peer institutions and NSSE staff members. Topics address how to use NSSE data for accountability, assessment, accreditation, self-studies, general education reviews, program reviews (curricular and co-curricular), and faculty development. Through a combination of plenary sessions, concurrent interest sessions, and group activities, participants learn more about linking NSSE data to other institutional data, using the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE) to understand faculty expectations for student engagement, and understanding educationally effective practice.

Please consider making a presentation on the ways your institution has used NSSE data to share with your colleagues. You can submit your proposal on-line at: http://nsse.iub.edu/institute/workshops/2006/scsu/proposal/. Even if you do not wish to make a presentation, we hope you will still join us as a workshop participant.

Presentations from recent NSSE User Workshops conducted at the University of Central Oklahoma, the University of Central Florida, and other institutions are posted on the NSSE Web site. Follow the link to "workshop presentations" (Papers and Presentations >> Workshop Presentations) on the NSSE homepage at: http://nsse.iub.edu.

Finally, we are seeking sites for 2007 User Workshops please contact us if you would like to host a NSSE workshop on your campus!

NSSE Roadshow

NSSE staff members are presenting at the following spring conferences:

Conference	Location	Date
Association of American College and Universities (AAC&U)	Washington, D.C.	January 25 – 28
American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU)	Charleston, SC	February 4 - 7
BEAMS Mid-Year Meeting	Washington, D.C.	February 13 - 15
Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning	Bloomington, MN	February 17 - 18
National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA)	Washington, D.C.	March 11 – 15
American College Personnel Association (ACPA)	Indianapolis, IN	March 18 – 22

Conference highlights include:

• At the AAC&U Conference, George Kuh, Tom Nelson Laird, Jillian Kinzie, and John Tagg will present, “Deep Learning, Liberal Education, and Institutional Practice: Emerging Findings, Provocative Lessons.” Another AAC&U session, “Stepping Stones to Sustainable Institutional Change Efforts” will be facilitated by George Kuh, Jillian, Kinzie, Gerald Francis, and Michael Bassis.
• At the AASCU Conference, Jillian Kinzie will present, “Using NSSE Data for Institutional Improvement: The Role of Provosts.”
• During the BEAMS Mid-Year Meeting, a session will be facilitated on, “Using NSSE to Assess Project Success” with Jillian Kinzie and Susan Johnson.
• During the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching Conference, NSSE Staff will be facilitating three different sessions: “Using NSSE Data,” “DEEP Lessons for Promoting Student Success and Education Effectiveness,” and a final session with minority serving institutions to discuss NSSE and BEAMS.
• ACPA Conference presentations include:
  • "Promoting Student Success: Lessons for Student Affairs Practice", Jillian Kinzie, George Kuh, and Elizabeth Whitt
  • "Practical Partnerships: Implications from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement", Susan Johnson and Tom Nelson Laird
  • "African American College Student Engagement: A Closer Examination", Susan Johnson
  • "Academic Identity of Doctoral Students: A Journey of Discovery", Rob Aaron
  • "Innovative Avenues for Faculty-Student Affairs Collaboration: Data Mining the Research", Jennifer Buckley and Tom Nelson Laird
  • "Interactional Diversity and First-Year Students", Jennifer Buckley and Jillian Kinzie
  • "Innovative Avenues for Faculty-Student Affairs Collaboration: Data Mining the Research." Jennifer Buckley and Tom Nelson Laird
• At the NASPA conference, Susan Johnson and Thomas Nelson Laird will present, "Practical Partnerships: Implications from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement." Jillian Kinzie will discuss, "Innovative Use of NSSE Data in Student Affairs," and Ted Ingram will co-facilitate a panel on "Improving the Status of African American Male Undergraduates."

Featured School

This will be the first year Canada’s own Concordia University will be participating in the NSSE survey. Senior Analyst in the Office of the Provost and Vice President, Bradley Tucker, is the institutional contact for the NSSE project on Concordia’s campus. Bradley received his Master’s degree in musicology and performance in 1978 from Indiana University and has been with Concordia University for the past 5 years.

With the efforts of the president, provost, and Bradley, they want to move their institution forward with quantitative data to improve academic planning. The NSSE survey was the instrument of choice due to its validity, history of comparative information, and psychometrics.

Above all, the bilingual application is a plus with a third of their students only speaking French. Additionally, Bradley noticed the numbers of Canadian institutions who participated in the survey and is impressed with the rising number of schools that will be participating in NSSE. They are developing uses of the data to compare findings across Canadian schools and some selective institutions in the Northeastern United States.

Concordia is very excited about their participation in this year’s administration and looking forward to high response rate. In attempt to boost response rates, Concordia will offer students the possibility of winning iPods, bookstore gift certificates, and a tuition-free semester. Some of their proactive marketing strategies include advertisement in the school’s paper, faculty encouraging their students to take part in the survey, and tables set up with students and information throughout campus. For more information about Concordia University and their work with NSSE, please visit their website at: http://www.concordia.ca

NSSE IN THE NEWS

November saw the release of the 2005 NSSE Annual Report, Exploring Different Dimensions of Student Engagement (http://webdb.iu.edu/Nsse/NSSE_2005_Annual_Report/index.cfm). The national and regional media attention generated by the 2005 findings was the most ambitious yet. Below are some of the major headlines from around the country:

	USA TODAY: "Report: College transfers can muddy quality of experience." USA TODAY’s annual take on NSSE findings. (11/6/05 – estimated 5,200,000 daily readership).
	The New York Times: "Switching colleges is common but takes a toll, survey finds." This piece examines the 2005 NSSE findings and what we are learning about transfer students. Anecdotal evidence from various institutions is given, as well as George’s insight into the findings. (11/8/05 – estimated 17,200,000 readers worldwide).
	The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Half of seniors took courses elsewhere before enrolling at current college.” Showcased in the "Students" section, an in-depth look at the NSSE 2005 findings and the “swirl” of students. (11/11/05- estimated 500,000 readers).
	Washington Post: "College learning secrets revealed.” Jay Mathews writes an intriguing piece about NSSE and CCSSE, calling NSSE, “One of the most interesting, useful and mysterious ratings of U.S. colleges." (11/15/05 – estimated 5,000,000 daily readers).

January also brought the release of the LSSSE (Law School Survey of Student Engagement) Annual Report, The Law School Years: Probing Questions, Actionable Data (http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/lssse/index.htm). Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed examined the apparent third-year slump in law school.

As always, you can view NSSE related media topics here.