Like many institutions, Oklahoma State University (OSU) is challenged by decentralization. This has complicated its efforts to disseminate NSSE data and reports and to implement change. In the past, although the university’s assessment office provided an executive summary report of NSSE results to various offices and academic colleges, this report was not consistently helpful because its broad findings were not specific to the units’ various needs and students.
The assessment office has since prioritized providing each unit with data pertinent to that unit’s work and the students it serves. The office has also developed resources to make data more accessible to faculty and staff across campus, including a new internal OSU website, dedicated to data and reports, that provides links to NSSE resources and information on accessing the NSSE Report Builder.
Getting faculty more invested in using NSSE results has also been a priority at OSU. In this effort, the assessment office has made it easier for faculty to access NSSE data for their own research endeavors. For example, two faculty members are comparing the engagement levels of in-state students who received need-based state-sponsored scholarships and those who did not.
Additionally, working with the Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence (ITLE), the assessment office has helped inform faculty workshops on using NSSE results. In a meeting with the ITLE’s support unit of instructional designers and various faculty members, for example, the assessment office provided a two-and-a-half-hour presentation on the implications of NSSE findings for faculty practice at OSU. The presentation included an overview of NSSE, information about the university’s recent NSSE response rates and respondent demographics, details about OSU’s selected comparison groups, and descriptions of areas of strength and areas for potential improvement. The presentation also included findings from Topical Modules and from BCSSE. The goal of the presentation was to identify what faculty were doing in their classrooms related to student engagement and what they could do to enhance it. One critical area of faculty practice that was identified correlates with NSSE’s Higher-Order Learning Engagement Indicator.
Since that presentation to ITLE, enhancing students’ higher-order learning across campus has become a focus at OSU. For example, among the newly developed ITLE faculty courses, which are hybrid in-person and online workshops, one of the courses focuses on more thoughtfully matching student needs with teaching methods; more deeply engaging students in content through activities that highlight analysis, application, and evaluation skills; and more closely aligning content assessments to teaching practices so that evaluation is more relevant and reliable. As evidence of this ITLE course’s impact, a chemical engineering faculty member who completed the course has converted his lecture-based course into a course incorporating guided problem-solving tasks with embedded informal, formative assessments that allow him to gauge student learning immediately and to make adjustments where necessary.
OSU is committed to finding new uses of NSSE data and to reaching a broader range of faculty with college-specific resources and support.
