Making NSSE Data Part of a Systematic Assessment Approach
California State University Northridge (CSUN) has participated in NSSE four times over the past five years. Data from its NSSE 2007 administration were widely circulated for the first time on campus by the Office of Institutional Research (IR). CSUN had participated in a paper administration in 2006, as part of the BEAMS project. This yielded relatively small numbers of responses, making results less reliable, so they were not widely circulated. The current Director of Institutional Research, Bettina Huber, opted for the web-only approach in 2007, along with an oversample of first-year (FY) students, with the result that just over 1,900 students completed the NSSE survey. Thanks to these “good numbers,” meaningful subgroup analysis was feasible for the first time. All departments and colleges at CSUN are expected to provide annual planning reports. To assist with this process, the IR office provided tables broken down by college (see Table 1) as part of a general overview of the 2007 NSSE findings presented at a spring 2008 session of the Provost’s Professional Development Series. The NSSE senior data, broken down by college, served as a focus for college-specific discussion groups held at the end of the session. Using the rich data from the oversample of FY students, Huber is currently comparing the progress of FY students who participated in University 100 (an introduction to the University) with those who did not take the class. She is also examining differences in engagement among seniors who entered the university as first-year students or later in their college careers as community college transfer students. Rather than using the NSSE Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, CSUN’s IR staff members have developed their own groupings of survey items to inform different educational processes students experience and to evaluate the effectiveness of certain campus services. For example, student responses regarding academic advising have been helpful in locating individuals’ difficulties with advising services within a broader context of fairly widespread satisfaction. Huber has also found the option to select peer comparison groups very useful and looks at the performance of CSUN in relation to other CSU campuses and other large public, primarily nonresidential institutions.
CSUN was among a few dozen colleges in the nation participating in the fall 2007 beta test of the VSA and provides information to the College Portrait, a common web template that institutions can use to meet the following objectives:
- Demonstrate accountability and stewardship to the public
- Measure educational outcomes to identify effective educational practices
- Assemble information that is accessible, understandable, and comparable
CSUN will continue to use NSSE data in future activities such as planned improvements to various university programs and exploring possible differences in the experiences of first-time FY and transfer students. Huber would also like to examine in more detail specific NSSE item clusters, such as those that comprise what she calls “abstract thinking skills” (judgment, analysis, memorizing) and are included in the Level of Academic Challenge benchmark.
