Making NSSE Data Part of a Systematic Assessment Approach
Clemson University has administered NSSE consecutively over the past seven years, beginning in 2003. A campus NSSE team was formed to provide faculty and administrative staff with resources and information about how to use NSSE in practice, and how to enhance the campus’s administration. Recently, renewed efforts to share NSSE results across campus and have meaningful conversations about putting the results into practice have begun.
Clemson’s president, James F. Barker, has set an institutional goal to become one of the top 20 public institutions in the nation by 2011. To reach this goal, increased focus has been placed on intentional data collection to ensure that all assessment instruments utilized are providing useful and actionable data. In addition to NSSE, Clemson participates in COACHE, a job satisfaction survey created by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University that gathers information on tenure-track faculty, and in the VSA.
For the first time in 2007, Clemson chose to customize its NSSE comparison groups. Eleanor Nault, Clemson’s Director of Assessment, reports that this option has made the data reports much more useful. She has also found the NSSE benchmarks to be very helpful for institutional level analysis. In addition to individual campus goals, the South Carolina State Budget and Control Board requires that all higher education institutions apply the Baldridge Criteria® reporting guidelines used to measure organizational performance. The Board used national criteria for educational quality and adapted them to address the Baldrige Criteria. In its accountability report to the State Board, each institution must benchmark its performance against these criteria. Clemson accomplishes this task by integrating NSSE, VSA, and other institutional data.
NSSE results have been presented to the entire Division of Student Affairs, sparking productive discussions concerning areas where the campus is succeeding in connecting with students, and areas that may require some attention. Stemming from the increase in emphasis on effective assessment measures at Clemson, the new Vice President of Student Affairs, Gail DiSabatino, invited Dr. George Kuh, Director of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and then Director of NSSE, to campus in the fall 2007. Dr. Kuh suggested that assessment efforts work to identify underengaged students. Clemson’s NSSE data has since been aggregated to identify large enough groups of students to successfully pinpoint characteristics of those who may be underengaged.
Given the number of years the campus has administered NSSE, their pool of respondents is large enough for this method to be effective. Presented with NSSE data, Clemson faculty members expressed concern over student reports of too few in-class discussions that address issues of diversity. The campus has since determined that faculty and students may have been interpreting the question differently. However, preserving the classroom as a safe space for conversations on diversity is very important to the University and faculty have been offered opportunities to learn more about teaching methods to engage students in these types of discussions. In addition, workshops on other types of pedagogical strategies have been developed and offered to faculty members.
NSSE data has been tied to other campus decisions at Clemson. Over the past three years, Clemson has initiated Creative Inquiry Projects—undergraduate research activities where faculty members guide small groups of students through a multi-semester project in various disciplines. Projects are designed to help students develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills, as well as the abilities to work on teams and express themselves effectively in written and verbal communication. A campus press release from last year highlighted how the Creative Inquiry program and other initiatives such as internships and cooperative experiences had, according to Clemson’s 2007 NSSE results, increased the numbers of students participating in undergraduate research to a level significantly higher than institutions in Clemson’s selected peer group.
Looking forward, Clemson plans to use NSSE data to evaluate first-year programs such as living and learning communities. Clemson’s response rate to the survey is approaching a level where the numbers of students involved in these communities are a large enough part of the random sample of its student population that more targeted analysis of their responses will be possible.
