During the last two weeks of October, 450 Mount Holyoke College sophomores and seniors will receive a new kind of national higher education survey in their campus mailboxes. A cover letter from Dean of the College Beverly Tatum will accompany the survey.
Cate Rowen, coordinator of institutional research and the College's contact person for the national survey team, hopes all 450 randomly chosen students will participate. It takes just fifteen minutes to fill out the survey's four pages of short fill-in-the-bubble questions, or to complete it electronically on the survey's Web site.
"The National Survey of Student Engagement is unique because it measures academic engagement from the student's perspective," says Rowen. The survey asks direct questions about how and where students have spent their time while in school. "It doesn't ask whether the experience was good or bad, but asks about the content of these experiences," Rowen adds.
Along with sixty other U.S. colleges and universities, Mount Holyoke is participating in the second pilot phase of a study undertaken by the nation's foremost research center in academic assessment, the Indiana University Center for Post-Secondary Research & Planning in Bloomington, Indiana. MHC is part of a peer subgroup of about a dozen selective private colleges including Haverford, Spelman, Williams, and Bryn Mawr.
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) project, funded by The Pew Charitable Trust, was launched in 1998 to provide institutions of higher learning with better information about student engagement in learning and learning outcomes. Because student levels of engagement correlate to quality outcomes in educational experience, the survey team believes that a national survey focusing on student engagement could redirect the current debate on quality in higher education.
The research team behind the NSSE wants to shift the debate to what it feels are the right questions, instead of the usual reputational approach to evaluating the value of higher education. "Popular views overdramatize what [resources ] colleges have, rather than what students do with these resources and how fully engaged they are in their own learning process," says project director George Kuh.
The NSSE will be useful in at least three ways: first, to the individual participating schools and colleges, which can use the data for improving their undergraduate education programs. Second, the survey results will be helpful to outside entities such as accrediting bodies and state oversight agencies. And third, the results will be of interest to media that cover higher education, such as newsmagazines and college guidebooks.
Students can think of the survey as a very sophisticated, anonymous suggestion box, but one with great credibility at the highest levels. "A good response from our students will aid us greatly in looking at how we educate women here, as well as providing better information at the national level," says Rowen. "Our results will be taken very seriously by the College's faculty and administration, as well as by external audiences. Good information will help the College respond directly to student needs identified in the survey, and will help us make decisions that work for students."
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