Making NSSE Data Part of a Systematic Assessment Approach
Peace College is a private, liberal arts college for women located in Raleigh, North Carolina. Faculty-student interaction is central to Peace’s mission and NSSE results serve as a gauge of how well they are doing in fulfilling that mission. Student-reported data on the extent to which they are challenged in their coursework is of major concern to faculty and administrators at Peace and significant focus is placed on the NSSE benchmark, Level of Academic Challenge. Two outcomes of this focus were the addition of a required statistics course to the general education curriculum and continuing conversations regarding pedagogy. Starting in 2008, Peace began comparing student performance from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) along with NSSE to gather more in-depth data on this benchmark.
Having recently completed its eighth administration of NSSE, Peace had made the reporting of NSSE results a part of the campus culture and an expected component of the campus’s regular assessment plan. In addition to use as an assessment tool, Peace’s marketing office has used NSSE results as a public relations resource for the campus. Dr. David B. McLennan, Associate Dean for Institutional Effectiveness and Professor of Communication and Political Science, issues annual reports to the institution’s curriculum committee and presents NSSE data to the faculty several times each year, charging them to review specific aspects of the data. While these groups are presented with detailed information, senior administrators at Peace receive a broad overview of all NSSE results. Even though NSSE results are widely disseminated across campus, Peace would like to dig deeper into its NSSE data and plans to begin more comparative analyses.
