Introducing the Campus Community to NSSE
Nazareth College, a religiously independent college with 2,000 undergraduates, located in a suburb of Rochester, New York, has participated in five NSSE administrations, including the updated survey in 2013. Institutional research (IR) staff at Nazareth implemented a comprehensive approach to introducing NSSE to the campus. To increase awareness of the upcoming NSSE administration and to stimulate student participation, they alerted faculty who taught primarily first-year or senior-level courses and encouraged them to mention the survey in their classes. Timing this email alert with the survey invitation schedule added relevance to the in-class reminders.
Following Nazareth’s successful administration, and before the college received NSSE results, IR staff distributed copies of the NSSE instrument to faculty and staff, inviting them to consider first what they wanted to learn from the results. In addition, an IR staff member brought copies of the survey instrument to a meeting of all campus directors to get the attention of campus leaders and to spark their anticipation of the arrival of results. The IR staff goal was to create widespread understanding of what NSSE data could tell them.
The NSSE Snapshot from the college’s Institutional Report was shared with two campus groups at Nazareth. The first group to consider the results was the President’s Council, composed of individuals representing each academic division as well as staff and administrative offices across campus. The Snapshot was then shared with a wider campus audience including all directors of programs and units. The goal was to create a campus-wide understanding of how the data could help them learn about the undergraduate experience. Different aspects of reporting on the Engagement Indicators (EIs) were discussed in these meetings, including the box-and-whisker charts, which in addition to demonstrating an admirable mean score also displayed a range of experiences among students. Drawing from the faculty and staff discussions of the Snapshot, institutional researchers reviewed their data to look at students who stayed and those who left. Narrowing this examination to students who left with a 3.0 GPA or better, IR staff found that these students scored very low on survey items related to effective teaching and, in particular, the organization of instruction. Faculty examined these findings more fully and considered ways of responding.
To create more actionable and tailored student engagement reports for departments, the IR staff generated customized reports using the campus’s production reporting tool, SAP Crystal Report. The first page of these reports displayed each department’s student response rate along with the rate for the whole campus and also with the rate for peers in a comparison group. The department reports similarly broke out the EIs, showing the responses for all items in each EI, again, with side-by-side display of results for the department, the institution, and the comparison group. In total, IR created 20-page reports (including results for certain questions by residency status, athletes, etc.) for about 22 different departments across campus. To follow up after the reports were distributed, IR staff conducted individual meetings with department faculty to clarify findings and to examine specific differences for students in these programs. In particular, the IR staff helped faculty make sense of data from small departments.
Nazareth used results from the core survey and also from the Academic Advising Topical Module to explore the relationship between instructional and advising practice and patterns in student persistence. Students with high GPAs who left the college had lower scores on certain advising items. These results were shared with the academic advisement department and the academic departments. Nazareth adopted a personal approach to introducing the campus to NSSE and created many opportunities for discussion of results. Plans are to continue to have campus conversations to examine results.
