Education

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But college-bound students can also learn from NSSE; it can help them evaluate whether a particular campus offers the kinds of experiences and opportunities that are known to benefit students.

NSSE works like this: The survey is sent to randomly selected first-year and senior students at participating colleges. The questions are related to desired outcomes of college and address five types of experiences, having to do with areas such as academic challenge or exposure to cultural activities, that research suggests any college-bound student ought to be looking for.

The 5 'benchmark' categories

The responses translate into five "benchmarks," which schools can compare against national averages for institutions of their type:

Level of academic challenge:

Challenging intellectual and creative work is central to student learning. Students are asked, for example, how much time they spent preparing for class, number of written papers or reports they write, and whether the coursework emphasizes things like synthesizing ideas or applying theories to practical problems.

Active and collaborative learning:

Students learn more when they are intensely involved in their education. Students are asked, for example, how often they participated in class discussions, made a class presentation, worked with classmates outside of class to prepare assignments, or discussed ideas from readings outside of class.

Student-faculty interaction:

Contact with professors offers students an opportunity to see how experts think about and solve practical problems. Students are asked, for example, whether they have worked with faculty members on activities outside of coursework, received prompt written and oral feedback, or worked with a faculty member on a research project.

Enriching educational experiences:

Activities that complement the classroom experience can make learning more meaningful. Students are asked, for example, whether they have had serious conversations with students who have different beliefs or values, or with students of a different race/ethnicity. They're also asked whether they have studied abroad and participated in student clubs, learning communities, internships and culminating senior experiences.

Supportive campus environment:

Students perform better when their college is committed to their success and cultivates positive social relationships among different groups of people. Students are asked, for example, whether the campus provides "the support you need" to succeed academically and thrive socially and to assess, for example, the quality of their relationships with other students, faculty and the administration.

Making sense of the numbers

One of the most important messages NSSE has to offer is that students can typically find opportunities for engaged learning at nearly any school. They just have to know what they should look for. Here, NSSE staff offer guidelines on how to make the benchmark scores work for you:

Play to your interests:

Consider which categories of engagement and which institutions interest you most. Suppose you are interested in fairly large research institutions and want to know whether students, particularly new students, interact with faculty. You could look at the student-faculty interaction scores for freshmen at schools of that type. From this, you could find those institutions where freshmen are interacting with faculty to a greater extent.

Think about your strengths and weaknesses:

Self-directed learners, for example, may want to investigate opportunities for working on research with a faculty or staff member. Other students may value and benefit more from environments that emphasize group work and collaborative learning.

Don't think of scores as grades or percentages:

Although they are presented on a 0-100-point scale, most schools' scores are in the middle of that range. You won't find perfect scores of 100, or even above 80. And ranges vary by benchmark and by class. Scores range roughly between 30 and 60 for first-year students and between 35 and 65 for seniors. If a score is more than 5 points higher than the national average for a school's institutional type, the difference is likely to be meaningful. But differences of, say, 1 or 2 points are not.

Note average scores for institutional types:

Different types of institutions have different missions and educational programs, so comparisons across institutional types are not always meaningful. Schools that enroll large numbers of adults or commuter students, for example, are likely to have lower scores because such students have less time to spend on campus and, therefore, tend to be less engaged than traditional undergrads who live on campus. But the school's more traditional undergraduate population may be just as engaged as traditional undergraduates at other campuses.

Avoid comparing first-year and senior benchmarks:

NSSE does not recommend comparisons between first-year and senior benchmarks, primarily because the two groups of students are not comparable. Rather than the same students tracked over time, these benchmarks reflect first-year and senior students surveyed in the same year. The two groups can be quite different for several reasons, such as: transfer or withdrawal of students between the first and senior years; the presence in the senior cohort of transfer students whose first year was at another institution; and changes in the applicant pool or admissions standards under which the two groups were admitted.

Focus on the big picture:

No matter how low or high the school's benchmark score, there are likely to be many students who are far more engaged than the benchmarks suggest and many who are far less so. "What you really want to know," Kuh says, "is who are the people who are engaged at high levels and what opportunities are they taking advantage of?" Clues from NSSE can help motivated students to look for the same kinds of opportunities at any college.

Don't stop at the NSSE scores:

No matter what colleges you're interested in, at least visit the schools' websites to get additional context about the undergraduate experience there. Follow up with an extensive campus visit at institutions that look promising.