NSSE NOTES
A series of findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement, and Spring Hill College's "NSSE Summit" held to discuss the results
Follow the links for more discussion
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Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practices |
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| 1) | Level of academic challenge |
| 2) | Enriching educational experiences |
| 3) | Student-faculty interaction |
| 4) | Supportive campus environment |
| 5) | Active and collaborative learning |
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Student Suggestions |
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| What students can do to become more engaged? | |
| What faculty can do to enhance student engagement? | |
Introduction
Among the harder tasks in assessing the success of a college or university are separating reputation from action, and untangling the quality of the students coming in from the quality of the students going out. Even if this can be done, there remains the not-so-simple task of knowing if the college in question is doing poorly, average, or well compared to other institutions. Finally, there is the need of colleges to take action to improve. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) is an effort to deal with all of these issues. By concentrating on student engagement, the survey seeks to untangle reputation from quality. It seeks to ask what a college does, not how good the students are. The results are then broadly benchmarked to allow comparison to similar institutions. Finally, the creators of NSSE emphasize that the intent is to improve colleges, not just measure what they do.
Spring Hill College participated in NSSE in 2002.
The survey, done near the end of the spring semester, asked a series of
questions of first-year students and students about to graduate.
The results have been aggregated into five main benchmarks of
“effective educational practices:”
Level of
academic challenge
Enriching educational experiences
Student-faculty interaction
Supportive campus environment
Active and collaborative learning
To explore the results more fully, the College conducted a “NSSE Summit” during the beginning of the Spring 2003 semester. At this gathering, a cross-section of 63 students discussed the results with 13 faculty facilitators. This series of NSSE Notes summarizes results from both the Survey and the Summit and, we hope, point us in the direction of making Spring Hill College an even stronger institution than we currently are.