Sharing and Responding to NSSE Data
Mills College is a small, selective liberal arts college for women located in Oakland, California. The college has participated in several NSSE administrations, including 2014, and has also participated in the Development of Transferable Skills Topical Module.
Mills creates infographic displays of data results as standard procedure for all of the surveys they participate in. Their NSSE infographic was created after receiving their 2014 results, and highlights NSSE items with Mills student results side by side with their peer. In providing snippets of data, via text or a small table, the infographic communicates NSSE results to help all members of the Mills community better understand “who they are.” The infographic also demonstrates to the students that the administration is doing something with the data and using the results.
Copies of the infographic were printed and displayed all over campus, and digital copies were shared directly with all members of the Mills executive cabinet. Further, the infographic was sent directly to offices and individuals who would find the information particularly relevant to their work. For example, the infographic and Development of Transferable Skills Topical Module results were shared with the admissions and career services offices. Admissions has used the infographic when speaking with potential students. Career services plans to discuss with students transferable skills results, paired with individual experiences and coursework at Mills and how skills such as verbal and written fluency and analytic inquiry relate to the job market. Additionally, the alumnae office has found the infographic to be very useful for their work and communication with Mills alumnae.
After the infographic was released, a full report on NSSE results was prepared and shared with the cabinet. The report was also posted on the campus intranet for all faculty and staff to access, generating more interest and campus activity around this report than ever before. The NSSE results led to a campus discussion around student social interaction and oral presentations. Specifically, the faculty were interested in the student responses to the questions about giving a course presentation. Responses revealed scores that were lower than Mills faculty would have liked, and that first-year students gave more class presentations than seniors did.
Faculty enthusiastically became involved in follow-up assessments to NSSE results. The campus is now engaging in an assessment to better understand how and where change might occur to increase the occurrences of oral presentations embedded within the general education curriculum. A committee of faculty, staff, and student representatives is collecting evidence to inform recommendations for action, including recordings of about 25 hours of senior seminar culminating presentations. Faculty will use a rubric (informed by the rubrics of MIT and the Association of American Colleges and Universities) to evaluate the oral presentations; their feedback will be shared with the committee to shape recommendations for refining the general education curriculum. The curriculum reform will reach across general education and into the disciplinary areas.
The next steps for the committee will then be to map where oral presentations are happening currently and to host faculty workshops on developing student oral presentation skills. The committee plans to map how oral presentation is first introduced in general education and how its development and practice continue within each degree program.
In addition to responding to the student oral presentation concern, Mills College was interested in responding to concerns about service-learning and deep-level processing. Mills 2014 NSSE results revealed that there was room to increase the number of opportunities for students to participate in service-learning. During spring 2015, a handful of designs to better integrate service-learning into general education were piloted. The curriculum transformation committee is also looking at NSSE results to shed light on deep-level processing, specifically, responses to “During the current school year, about how much of your coursework emphasized the following: analyzing an idea, experience, or line of reasoning in depth by examining its parts?”
The most significant factor in helping faculty become receptive to NSSE results were the insights gained through examining them, which informed existing campus conversations on general education reform. With the current strategic plan calling for an overhaul of general education, the curriculum transformation taskforce was very interested in what could be learned from NSSE results, especially the questions on oral presentations, quantitative reasoning, and social interaction. Faculty found the Engagement Indicators to be actionable because they provided insight into what the faculty could do better. Mills has always done well on the NSSE construct of Level of Academic Challenge, but the updated survey provided additional insights into how students are being challenged. Additionally, the release of the college’s NSSE infographic, followed by the detailed report, may have helped gain attention and build interest in the results. Individuals at Mills are paying more attention to the NSSE reports and are interested in discussing the results. The combination of the campus already prioritizing curriculum transformation, via the strategic plan, and the release of their NSSE 2014 results seemed to be perfectly timed to focus attention on using results.
