At St. Olaf College, NSSE data are woven into the decision making of the Board of Regents, the President’s Leadership Team, the Academic Leadership Team, the Curriculum Committee, and the Provost. For example, NSSE items and Engagement Indicators are incorporated into the Board of Regents Community Life Committee metrics for campus diversity, student wellbeing, and student engagement. These data are triangulated with other sources of information such as the St. Olaf Student Information System, the National College Health Assessment, and the St. Olaf Learning Goals Questionnaire. Beyond establishing reliable metrics, mapping different sources of data to desired goals allows the committee to more strongly align these goals with the St. Olaf College president’s vision and to identify important areas where data are not currently being collected. Additionally, NSSE data have recently been used by St. Olaf staff (a) to inform a particular line of decision making within the institution and (b) to analyze data collected previously to answer constituents’ questions. NSSE results are also used to communicate institutional achievements to the public. For example, on St. Olaf’s institutional learning outcomes website, StOGoals, NSSE data are used to show evidence for Insightful Integration and Application of Learning and Intentional and Holistic Self-Development. After a St. Olaf College NSSE administration a number of years ago, the college’s Institutional Research and Effectiveness office conducted student focus groups to examine the institution’s survey responses. Among the concerning issues that emerged from these focus groups was students’ uncertainty about formal and informal advising and the different types of encounters with each. A task force was convened to evaluate the academic advising received by St. Olaf’s students.
Expanding the institution’s data collection on this issue, in its next NSSE administration, St. Olaf used the Academic Advising Topical Module, enabling the comparison of St. Olaf’s academic advising efforts with those of participating peer institutions. The resulting information gathered through the focus groups and NSSE, as well as other surveys conducted on campus and with alumni, guided the restructuring of St. Olaf’s new academic advising office and also informed the hiring process for a new director of that office. In summary, to address an emergent issue in its academic advising, St. Olaf took a specific course of action—reworking academic advising—and gathered high-quality information to carry out that action successfully.
The Institutional Research and Effectiveness office has also used NSSE data to answer questions posed by the Board of Regents about the quality of the St. Olaf student experience. In one instance, board members were curious about how St. Olaf students would score in areas measured on the Gallup-Purdue Index, a national study linking college student success to high-impact experiences such as internships and extracurricular activities. Although St. Olaf had not participated in this study, the Institutional Research and Effectiveness office was able to answer the board’s question by leveraging data already collected through the NSSE survey and the Higher Education Data Sharing (HEDS) Consortium alumni survey—for example, to provide the percentage of St. Olaf seniors who participated in an internship, co-op, field experience, student teaching, or clinical placement, and, further, to contextualize this percentage by providing comparison group data. It is not uncommon for members of St. Olaf’s Board of Regents to read about trends in higher education and to wonder, “How well are we doing?” With extensive high-quality data on hand—along with the knowledge of how to weave these data into decision making—St. Olaf’s institutional research office is prepared to answer.
