Streamline Training & Documentation: National Survey of Student Engagement

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

National Survey of Student Engagement

A while back I wrote about the College Learning Assessment, a tool developed by the Council for Aid to Education in order to measure outcomes of a college education in three key areas: critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication.

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is another tool for measuring quality in higher education. Developed by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, the NSSE

is designed to obtain, on an annual basis, information from scores of colleges and universities nationwide about student participation in programs and activities that institutions provide for their learning and personal development.

The idea is to understand

how undergraduates spend their time and what they gain from attending college. Survey items on The National Survey of Student Engagement represent empirically confirmed "good practices" in undergraduate education. That is, they reflect behaviors by students and institutions that are associated with desired outcomes of college.

The results of the NSSE have suggested these five benchmarks of effective educational practice:

Challenging intellectual and creative work — clear emphasis on acadmic effort, with high expectations for student performance (as evidenced by, e.g., frequent writing assignments).

Student interactions with faculty members inside and outside the classroom — to get first-hand exposure to how experts think about and solve practical problems.

A supportive campus environment — achieved through cultivating positive working and social relations among different groups on campus.

Active and collaborative learning — involving students in thinking about and applying what they are learning in different settings and in working with others to solve complex problems and master difficult material.

Enriching educational experiences — such as interacting with a diverse group of fellow students, undertaking internships and community service, and carrying out senior-year capstone courses or projects.

Individual colleges and universities use the results of the survey to identify ways of improving their undergraduates' experience at school. Prospective college students and their parents and advisers can look at the results for a range of schools when deciding which schools the students will apply to.

The NSSE was piloted in 1999. It has been administered every spring since then, with over 970 different colleges and universities participating in the first six years. You can read the NSSE's 2006 annual report here (pdf).

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Labels: Evaluation of training, Quality

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