Using Results to Improve Educational Practice
Bethel University, an evangelical Christian university in St. Paul, Minnesota, has participated in 10 NSSE administrations. NSSE results have been used in various ways at Bethel, including to provide evidence of students’ active learning and senior students’ satisfaction with their educational experience and to promote innovative instructional practice.
After Bethel’s participation in NSSE 2013, the campus prepared two reports. The first report contextualized NSSE by explaining what the results mean, comparing the 2013 results with results from Bethel’s 2010 administration and identifying areas of strength. The second report, using first-year and senior NSSE responses, identified four themes for campus improvement and listed specific actions that faculty could take to improve their results, specifically targeting the existing campus initiative to improve student writing and integrative thinking. These two reports were shared with campus faculty and administrators at various department, committee, and staff meetings. Examples from both follow.
NSSE 2010 Bethel student responses to “received feedback from an instructor on a draft or a work in progress before submitting the final product” caught faculty attention, and they flagged this item as a target area for improvement. Informal follow up revealed that students expected feedback from faculty as quickly on a five-question quiz as they did on a 20-page research paper. Recognizing this as opportunity to improve, the Program Assessment Committee connected with the Faculty Development Committee to create workshops to address the issue of timely feedback. The committees collaborated to send an email to the all-faculty listserve with steps for how to discuss with students expectations for feedback on different assignments. To go further, the Faculty Development Committee developed a workshop on “how to give helpful feedback to students.” For both first-year and senior students, Bethel’s 2013 NSSE results on this item improved from their 2010 NSSE results, and in 2013 their students’ responses on this item were more similar to those of comparison groups.
Bethel’s NSSE 2013 results revealed that both first-year students and seniors were significantly less likely to say they worked harder than they thought they could to meet an instructor’s expectations compared to students at colleges and universities across the country. Additionally, seniors were significantly less likely to say that their courses during the current school year challenged them to do their best work compared with seniors nationwide. The NSSE results further revealed that both first-year and senior students were much less likely to say they carefully revised the content or organization of a paper or assignment before turning it in compared to students nationwide. In response to these results, faculty were encouraged to consider their current expectations for students and how challenge could play a greater role in the classroom experience.
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) were highlighted as an area of great strength in Bethel’s NSSE 2013 results, with 89% of Bethel seniors participating in at least two HIPs, including service-learning, research with faculty, internship or field experience, learning communities, and culminating senior experiences. The importance of HIPs reinforced Bethel’s commitment to building in a culminating senior experience into almost all majors. Moreover, compared to seniors at other institutions, Bethel was pleased to find that, compared to seniors at other institutions, its seniors write more during a school year, spend more time studying per week, and participate more in co-curricular activities. Bethel’s data use example illustrates how NSSE results can inform faculty development agendas and, more important, can influence improvements in teaching and learning. Through their future NSSE results, Bethel plans to continue monitoring their progress in addressing their areas for improvement and sustaining their strengths.
