Playing in the Sandbox for Student Success
Ensuring student success is a top priority at the University of Rhode Island (URI), where since 2003 NSSE has been used to measure students’ perceptions of the institution. More recently, URI’s Vice President of Enrollment Management formed the Student Success Team, bringing together about 30 faculty, staff, and administrators from across multiple departments and disciplines who were to focus on removing structural impediments to student learning and improving graduation rates. Two initiatives the team has already implemented are curriculum maps for every major and the Take 5, Finish in 4 program that encourages students to complete five three-credit courses every semester in order to graduate in four years. Measuring the effectiveness of these programs requires a comprehensive assessment plan that includes NSSE data.
Recognizing the contribution of people’s time and resources while meaningfully sharing and utilizing results is also a top priority at URI. The Student Success Team has been intentionally working to create a deeper understanding of data and action items among individual faculty and across the institution to improve student learning. A new team initiative, called the Sandbox, was implemented to bring together educators from across campus to dig into URI’s NSSE results.
The Sandbox, emulating the idea of playing with the data, brought together approximately 40 faculty and staff to learn more about NSSE and student assessment. The Sandbox took place in an “active classroom” within the institution’s library—a space equipped with a dozen electronic whiteboards connected to laptops in the room, allowing small groups of participants to play with the data, take notes, and present their own findings.
The Sandbox session began with an introduction to NSSE, including a description and explanation of the items, survey themes, Engagement Indicators, and additional survey questions. After familiarizing participants with the survey, members of the Student Success Team shared examples of results the team had already analyzed. To keep participants engaged, facilitators shared graphs of their analysis and asked participants to interpret the data, to share their conclusions, and to ask any further questions they may have had about the data.
One facilitator example focused on a survey item on how students use their time. Findings suggested class level was not a significant factor, with both first-year and senior students averaging 15 hours per week on coursework outside of class. To showcase opportunities for digging deeper into results, facilitators disaggregated data further by major, finding nursing majors actually above average in hours spent on coursework. This walk-through helped the faculty follow the data down to deeper and deeper levels to gain more confidence for their own analyses.
At the University of Rhode Island, data are not seen as stagnant but as opportunities to better understand the institution and its students.
Once faculty and staff had a chance to familiarize themselves with the assessment process and the NSSE survey, they were provided an opportunity to complete an analysis of their own. The Student Success Team created a spreadsheet containing all the URI data from the NSSE core survey as well as two modules, First-Year and Senior Transitions and Academic Advising. Participants were able to copy and paste cells into a separate tab that updated result charts automatically. The goal was to have everyone, in small groups, browse the survey to find questions related to their particular area of interest, update the spreadsheet, and write conclusions on the whiteboards. At the end of the 90 minutes, participants felt more comfortable with their understanding of assessment data and more confident in their abilities to incorporate assessment into their own practice.
The Sandbox was a huge success. To maintain the assessment momentum, the Student Success team has offered additional incentives. One invited attendees to come up with a research question answerable by NSSE data and to present it to the assessment office to receive funding for their research. Individuals or groups who receive this funding are then asked to present their findings to other campus constituents.
The University of Rhode Island is a data-informed institution, where data are not seen as stagnant but as opportunities to better understand the institution and its students. By creating an active culture of assessment, URI is turning rich data about their students into actionable knowledge to improve the campus community.
*Acknowledgement: After contributing to this account of NSSE data use, Dr. Gary Boden passed away in July 2020. At the time, he was Senior Information Technologist in the Office of Institutional Research at the University of Rhode Island.
