Volume 20 - Number 4

NSSE: What Is It and Why Should We Care?

The results of the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE, pronounced “Nessie”) are in, and your students gave Western high marks on all five of the benchmark measures. In many cases, we exceeded similar measures for our Carnegie peers and the national average for more than 500 participating colleges and universities. What does this mean to you and why should you care about our NSSE results? The NSSE is an attempt to reintroduce the idea that colleges and universities should be judged by how well and to what extent our students engage in activities that we know contribute to learning and development. This is a relatively rare notion in higher education today with university systems, state legislatures, and state and federal bureaucracies all demanding accountability on the one hand but proposing measures that are, at best, indirect reflections of institutional quality on the other.

The tax-paying public and a variety of college and university constituents are demanding more information on institutional quality and performance, but how we conceptualize quality among our colleges and universities is shifting away from the triumvirate notions of institutional wealth, selectivity, and prestige to that of an institution’s actual contribution to student learning and development. Examples abound that reflect this shift. Regional accrediting agencies have moved en masse to affirm the primacy of student learning in their standards over that of traditional institutional inputs. University presidents and chancellors are publicly questioning the value and validity of high-stakes ranking schemes such as the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings guide. And, in 2006, the U.S. Secretary of Education convened a national Commission on the Future of Higher Education with the explicit charge to consider how best to ensure that our colleges and universities are graduating students that are well prepared to fulfill future workforce needs. A prominent recommendation from this group was for more transparent mechanisms for colleges and universities to report on student learning.

In this context, many institutions have sought standardized measures that will allow comparisons between institutions as well as a meaningful measure that can be used within institutions to guide programming and services. Enter the National Survey of Student Engagement, organized conceptually around five benchmarks of effective educational practice:

1. level of academic challenge
2. active and collaborative learning
3. student-faculty interaction
4. enriching educational experiences
5. supportive campus environment 

The survey is administered to first-year and senior students only, representing points of entry and exit from our institutions.

WCU participated in NSSE in 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007. The early administrations indicated we were performing fairly well in most benchmarks, but anemic response rates and a general lack of interest resulted in little use of the results at an institutional level. In 2006, however, WCU’s NSSE results came to the attention of the campus committee charged with developing our Quality Enhancement Plan. WCU’s NSSE results figured prominently in the identification of areas in which we could have a significant impact. In 2007, a concerted effort to advertise the survey among students resulted in a significant increase in our response rate, which increased our confidence in the representative nature of the NSSE results for WCU. 

The table below provides you a quick comparison of WCU benchmark scores relative to our Carnegie peers and that of the total 2007 NSSE cohort.

            As you can see, WCU scored as well as and, in most cases, better than our peers and the national cohort on all the benchmarks for both first year and senior students. Of particular note is how well WCU scored on the two benchmark categories most attributable to faculty: Active and Collaborative Learning, and Student-Faculty Interaction. Indeed, these scores qualify WCU as a strong national performer in these benchmark categories. And, that is something every faculty member on this campus should care about and of which all can be proud.         

Melissa Canady Wargo, Office of Assessment

The opinions printed here belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the editorial staff or of the Faculty Center. If you would like to respond, e-mail Terry Nienhuis by the 20th of the month. Your responses will be published with the next issue of The Faculty Forum.