NSSE Overview and Analysis: 2015 Administration

Nathan Mack
Volkwein University
December 2016

Executive Summary
The National Survey of Student Engagement has been administered at Volkwein University
since the year 2001. Since that time, the data from this valuable instrument have served to
challenge our institution to improve student learning and engagement.
In the year 2015, VU administered the most recent version of the NSSE with a new charge:
analyze the data with enrollment management in mind. Yield rates and overall enrollment figures
at VU have fallen from across the immediate region and the President wishes to increase our
standing among regional peer institutions in order to attract more students.
As we know from previous NSSE administrations, Volkwein University has performed very well
over the years in relation to Peer Institutions across the nation. The focus now is on Regional
Peers. The results of the 2015 NSSE point to a few key areas where both student engagement and
the involvement in educationally significant activities could be strengthened, due primarily to
our success to date. It is the hope that the given our past performance, improvements will be
welcomed and easily implemented on our campus.
We seek to increase participation in newly designed Faculty-Led Learning Communities that
will encompass a renewed focus on academic advising, career preparation, service learning, and
student feedback. It is the hope of Volkwein University and its administration that the success of
this program will increase student engagement and further, assist us in competing with our
regional peers for new undergraduate students. Additionally, in the long term, through learning
community participation Volkwein University also hopes to begin to address the increasingly
salient issue of first-year retention on our campus.

The National Survey of Student Engagement

The National Survey of Student Engagement, first administered in the year 2000, has grown
exponentially over the years and is now considered to be a preeminent method of analyzing
student engagement. The benefit of NSSE is that these analyses can be relevant for all
institutions and can be used to implement meaningful changes on any university campus
(NSSE, n.d.).
History
In the year 1987, an important meeting was held by the Education Commission of the States and
The Johnson Foundation to discuss higher education. As a result of these meetings, prominent
scholars such as Chickering developed The Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate
Education which was distributed by the American Association for Higher Education
(Chickering & Gamson, 1987).

Good Practice Encourages Student-Faculty Contact

Good Practice Encourages Cooperation among Students
Good Practice Encourages Active Learning
Good Practice Gives Prompt Feedback
Good Practice Emphasizes Time on Task
Good Practice Communicates High Expectations
Good Practices Respects Diverse Talents and Ways of Learning

In developing these practices, Chickering and others utilized the work of many notable scholars
of student engagement, such as Astin and Kuh, the theories of which will be discussed in greater
detail later in this report.
In the year 1998, subsequent meetings were held that included these scholars and many others,
the purpose of which were to discuss a system whereby institutions could be judged by their
ability to foster learning for their students. As Kuh himself stated, they hoped to develop a
method to ascertain whether students participate in good educational practices and what
experiences they were having on their respective campuses (Kuh, 2009a). As a result of many
conversations, NSSE was born.
NSSE has attracted many college and university partners and is an important educational tool as
it allows many different types of institutions from across the United States and Canada to use the
same methodology to assess student engagement. Every college/university from Volkwein
University to Yale to the University of Kansas to Western Washington University has the ability
to implement the survey. Further, as will be discussed in detail later in this report, institutions
can use this report to benchmark themselves with their peers.

Student Engagement
As was mentioned above, many pre-eminent higher education scholars were co-founders of what
we now know as the NSSE. These individuals have conducted decades of research that allows
us, as institutions of higher learning, to understand how to have a meaningful impact on our
students.
Student engagement represents the time and effort students devote to activities that are
empirically linked to desired outcomes of college and what institutions do to induce
students to participate in these activities
-George Kuh, 2009b
Student Engagement serves as one of the most important concepts for understanding NSSE, its
history and why the survey has been administered at VU. As the quote describes, student
engagement refers not only to the students themselves but also we do as an institution to
encourage engagement.
Engagement itself refers to a variety of things, both empirically in the literature and within the
NSSE report. It can encompass everything from reflection to leadership to involvement to
student-faculty interaction to discussion-based learning and more (Kuh, 2009b). It is important to
note that engagement activities such as these have been shown in the research to lead to
educationally positive outcomes (Anaya, 1996; Kuh, 1995).
Student Engagement as a concept proves quite easy to digest but in practice, can be difficult to
define and induce. As such, scholars have developed a more concrete list of what are considered
High Impact Practices. An HIP is an education practice that within the research has been
shown to have a positive impact on student engagement (Kuh, 2009). They serve as productive
forces and facilitate deeper learning on our campuses. Examples include first year seminars,
study abroad, internships, leadership, capstone courses, etc.
As one will see in this report, NSSE has developed a robust list of measures by which to analyze
both student engagement levels and the involvement in high impact practices at VU.

NSSE at Volkwein University

NSSE has been administered at Volkwein University since the year 2001 and the institution has
a strong history of utilizing the data to make decisions that impact student learning on campus.
As we will see in the data, on many levels, our levels of student engagement and involvement in
high impact practices place us at a competitive advantage to many of our peer institutions.
The 2015 Administration
President Shah arrived at Volkwein University in the year 2012 and after a year on campus,
received an important annual enrollment report. Within this report, it was noted that the
percentage of students graduating from high school within the region immediately surrounding
VU was trending upwards at a few percentage points a year. Further, it was added that these
students were increasingly attending four-year institutions of higher education at an even higher
rate.
Nevertheless, despite these increases within the region, Volkwein University has seen no growth
in applications and admitted students from across the region. Further, the yield rate of admitted
students has decreased resulting in lower enrollment at Volkwein University. However, VUs
regional peers have seen experienced no change or an increase in enrollment from across the
region. Given that Volkwein is a private, tuition-dependent institution, these facts are
concerning.
Within the functional area of College Admissions, yield rates serve as an important metric by
which to analyze operational success. Yield rate refers simply to the percentage of admitted
students that ultimately choose to enroll or matriculate to the university. The higher the yield
rate, within the industry, the more attractive a position the institution is assumed to hold for its
prospective students and families (Ross, 2016).
Because yield rates from within the region have decreased, President Shah has asked the
Enrollment Management Division to serve on the NSSE Committee for the 2015 administration
so that the information can be analyzed in light of these enrollment statistics. In particular,
President Shah has requested that the committee analyze the results of NSSE with a focus on
comparison to Regional Peer Institutions. The charge from the Presidents Office is that the data
may hopefully assist the institution in making improvements in student learning and engagement,
and thus yield more students from across the region.
Planning begin early in 2014 and ultimately, NSSE was administered in Spring 2015 at VU with
an overall response rate of 20% of eligible students. A comprehensive marketing plan was in
place to encourage student participation and ultimately, the results were fairly representative of
the overall student population. The NSSE report that we recently received contains data for both
first-year and senior students, however for the purposes of this report, only first-year student data
will be analyzed as first year experiences and second-year retention are of significant importance
to Enrollment Management and specifically, University Admissions.

Structure of NSSE
As of 2016, NSSE has 38 important questions covering a wide variety of topics (NSSE, n.d.):

Student participation in educationally purposeful activities,

Institutional requirements and the challenge of coursework,
Perceptions of institutional environment,
Perceived educational and personal growth, and
Background and demographic information.

Each category has a particular set of questions that are associated with it. Examples of questions
both simple and complex are included for review:

During the current school year, about how often have you done the following?
o Examined the strengths and weaknesses of your own views on a topic or issues
o Given a course presentation
Indicate the quality of your interactions with [students, academic advisors, faculty] at
your institution.
Of the time you spend preparing for class in a typical 7-day week, about how much is on
assigned reading?
How you would evaluate your entire educational experience at this institution?

As one can see, the questions elicit differing types of answers and uncover many important
topics related to student engagement.
These questions are then associated with specific Learning Themes and Related Engagement
Indicators. A few of these items will be highlighted in the analysis section of this report.

At the end of the survey, demographic questions are also asked of the students.

NSSE Results
NSSE provides relevant data to institutions in two main categories:
Engagement Indicators
-the levels at which students engage in certain levels of engagement on a 60-point scale
(never=0, sometimes=20, often=40, and very often=60)
High-Impact Practices
-the percentage of students that are involved in a) one or b) two or more HIPs
Volkwein Universitys Respondents
A grand total of 608 first year students participated in the NSSE Survey.
A few important data sets have been included below. As one can see, many of the first-year
student respondents were raised in households where parents completed at least some college.
Most students are white, traditional freshman age (under 19), and live on campus. What is
significant for enrollment management is that these data are particularly reflective of the typical
admitted and enrolled student at VU.

One important note: the results skew highly towards female students.

Peer Analysis

Engagement Indicators
As one can see from the chart below, Volkwein University performs statistically significantly
higher than Peer Institutions. However, due to a small effect size our results are not as practically
significant.
In this report, we wish to focus on our comparison to Regional Peers; within the chart, one can
see that most data points are not statistically significant. If the institution hopes to create an
environment in which students are significantly educationally engaged and as a result, attract and
yield more students from across the region in competition with our regional peers, significant
improvement in some of these areas may be necessary.

This report will highlight two areas within these Engagement Indicators that can serve as a
catalyst for further conversation regarding institutional improvement: Student-Faculty Interaction
and Effective Teaching Practices. As a result of our goal to become a more attractive educational
option to students within the region, we have chosen to outline these specific two indicators
because we have performed statistically rather well compared to Peer Institutions but not
Regional Peers. The hope is that our success thus far will serve as impetus to improve more
significantly.

Experiences with Faculty

As is highlighted in the chart above, overall we place significantly statistically higher in the two
categories associated with Faculty than our Peer Institutions. The effect size is rather small
however the results are positive. However, compared to our Regional Peers (third column), our
performance is relatively statistically insignificant with an even smaller or irrelevant effect size.
These figures serve as a challenge to our institution to perform at a more educationally engaging
level.
Student-Faculty Interaction and Effective Teaching Practices
There are four main questions, shown below, within NSSE that contribute to overall Experiences
with Faculty results and it is from these specific inquiries that discussion shall follow.
As is the case with the overall results of engagement indicators, we perform statistically better
against Peer Institutions however not against Regional Peers. With Regional Peers, the results
are statistically insignificant with no effect.
The effect size is largest for discussion about academic preparation with a faculty member.

High Impact Practices

The data here show that VU fares statistically less well with Regional Peers related to the
participation in High Impact Practices. Of particular statistical and relative practical significance
are Learning Community and Service-Learning participation rates, where our figures are
significantly lower with small effect sizes.

Subgroup Analysis
It is important to note that when analyzing the data, the researchers must be cautious about
drawing conclusions among groups of students. For example, while the rates of participation for
female and male students seem to compare evenly, we must remember that females outnumbered
males in their completion of NSSE by a significant figure (58% v. 42%). Further analysis will be
required to understand these results more fully.

Conclusion
Before specific recommendations are made, it is important to remember the purpose of this
analysis: Increasing Student Engagement in Relation to Regional Peers for the Hopeful
Purpose of Increasing Yield Rates and Enrollment of Admitted Students from the Region.
The data presented in this report allow us to make a few claims:
a) There are a few areas where, as a whole, we perform statistically higher than our Peer
Institutions but not our Regional Peers. These areas relate to Student-Faculty Interaction and
Effective Teaching Practices.
b) Overall, for first-year students, our HIP participation rates are lower than at our Regional
Peers but not statistically as different from Peer Institutions. Our rates for Service Learning and
Learning Communities are of particular importance.
The NSSE committee recommends the implementation of the following:
Create a new learning community model by pairing a first-year core course with a firstyear seminar taught by a faculty member. The faculty member for the first-year seminar
will serve as an academic advisor for their students and service learning and career
planning will be included within the lesson plan. Further, faculty assigned to these first
year seminars will be provided with training workshops related to meaningful feedback on
student assignments and tests.
It is the hope of the committee that this recommendation will increase engagement and the
occurrence of meaningful high impact practices.
First, the institution plans to increase the percentage of students that discuss career plans and
academic performance with their faculty (the later the most notable weakness in the data). As an
academic advisor, the faculty member can facilitate this type of learning both through informal
and formal teaching methods.
Second, by providing valuable teaching workshops directly to faculty on timely and meaningful
student feedback, we hope to improve upon effective teaching practices.
Third, by creating new learning communities and including service learning into the lesson
plans, we anticipate that our participation rates in these two activities will increase.
Overall, the new Learning Community Model will serve as an important first year experience for
incoming students. If successful, the program could increase engagement and high impact
practices, raise our status compared to Regional Peers, and serve as a valuable recruitment tool
for future students from across the region. Further, as the scholar Vincent Tinto acknowledged, a
program like this could increase retention (Tinto, 1999): an issue that Enrollment Management
plans to address in the coming academic years.

References
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college environments, and cocurricular activities. Journal of College Student Development,
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