UWF Uses NSSE Data to Design a Self-Study on HIP Participation Barriers
Involving more students in high-impact practices (HIPs) is a university-wide commitment at the University of West Florida. Assistant Professors Dr. April Schantz and Dr. Holley Handley’s recent collaboration used data from the National Survey for Student Engagement (NSSE) for an intra-institutional assessment of the barriers preventing students at The University of West Florida (UWF) from participating in HIPs. With the support of their HIP liaisons, UWF actively works to break silos and communicate practices across each college.
Assistant Professor Dr. Holley Handley serves as a HIP liaison for the College of Education.
“We are the communicator, the connector between what’s going on at each department level in the university to try to share experiences, to crowdsource, and help faculty learn from each other to truly make high-impact practices institutionalized at our university,” said Handley. Together, their HIP liaisons have developed a HIP faculty toolkit, workshops, book clubs, and newsletters as part of their efforts. The HIP Barriers self-study initiative began from a university-wide commitment to high-impact practices and a project to connect UWF students with internships.
Schantz recalled, “We made internships available, and we promoted, and we got the word out through the advisors, flyers, and everything. And then we ended up with very little participation. And we’re like, what’s going on here? So, we started with some focus groups just asking the students what has been their experience with the internship? And one of the responses was, “Internship? There was an internship?”. Like, okay, somewhere, we’re missing the conversation and missing that connection with students. But what are the other barriers students are facing?”
The focus groups illuminated barriers such as time and financial constraints, and awareness of what a HIP is and where and how to engage with them.
“We wanted to scale up and incorporate the information we do have, and this is all part of the organization or the institution’s goals and commitment to high-impact practices overall. In fact, we have a whole team of high-impact practices liaisons and representatives from each college, who helped guide and serve as kind of an advisory board and support for us,” Schantz said.
Part of that available information was their NSSE data. NSSE provides participating institutions with student engagement data that can provide benchmarks with peer institutions of similar size and Carnegie classification. However, what UWF needed was a way to look inward. Handley and Schantz designed an instrument to assess their performance on high-impact practices. The project investigated UWF’s student engagement performance across three levels:
- Compared to expectations according to NSSE.
- Differentially across college units in the institution.
- According to students’ behaviors and perspectives.
“This was a full institution project collaboration to bring in the information from our students from our colleges within the institution and compare it to the NSSE data,” Schantz said. Schantz and Handley’s instrument collected qualitative and quantitative data from students across all class levels at UWF. They also asked questions to align student responses to their respective colleges.
“That’s what enabled us to get the summary statistics per college within the institution. This gave us great insight – both in comparing the NSSE data to our overall college – but also comparing within colleges the information on which HIP types were most frequently used within each college as a function of the student’s program. So, this was great information,” Schantz said.
The qualitative items provided information to identify accessibility issues and relevant barriers to student engagement and high-impact practices. Using NSSE data from the prior year’s administration, they compared the results from the internal data. With this research design, they compared their prior-year NSSE administration data to the internal data collection to look for exemplars within the institution. What they found was:
Overall, they were doing well on collaborative projects, e-portfolios, internships, and intensive writing across the whole institution.
The College of Arts and Social Sciences significantly engages in HIP types, including undergraduate research, e-portfolios, internships, capstones, and intensive writing.
The College of Business had the most success in promoting engagement of diversity in study abroad compared to all the other colleges.
The College of Sciences excelled in promoting engagement of the First Year Experiences and the learning communities.
The College of Health had the highest service and community learning engagement across all colleges.
“So all of the colleges showed their favorite HIP types. And if we’re able to use that or leverage it at an institutional level, we can get those exemplars to help our other areas see their opportunities,” Schantz said.
To look at student behaviors and perspectives of how they engage in high-impact practices, the team used latent class analysis to identify four patterns of HIP engagement and find areas of opportunities. The richness of their data collection provides their project with many avenues for continuation and improving HIP participation at UWF. Schantz and Handley anticipate the next step is to evolve their assessment strategy toward the quality of high-impact practices rather than just the quantity of what’s offered.
“We still have some opportunities because less than half of the students participated in any of the HIP types. So even though we have all this support from the HIP liaisons in our institution and from faculty and everything, we have opportunities. That was really good information to have,” said Schantz.
For more information or questions about this project, Schantz and Handley can be reached at aschantz@uwf.edu and hhandley@uwf.edu.
