Is Time on Your Side? A Look at Time Use Patterns for Honors Students

Angie Miller
July 9, 2020

Adapted from a paper presented at the World Gifted Conference, 2019.

How do honors college students spend their time compared to other students? Previous research suggests that honors college students are more engaged in certain ways: more frequently interacting with faculty, reflecting on their learning, learning collaboratively, and reporting higher quality of interactions (Miller & Dumford, 2018). Most honors programs include more academically rigorous […]

Creating Excel Reports with R: NSSE Student Comments Report

Brendan J. Dugan
July 2, 2020

This post was adapted from a poster presentation for AIR 2020.

In 2019, NSSE staff upgraded the Student Comments Report to include a bar chart like the one below, to illustrate satisfaction among students who did and did not leave a comment at the end of the survey. We also changed how we craft the report, processing and populating all the data elements […]

Assessment Data Asterisk: What Can NSSE Campuses Learn from Spring 2020 Results?

Jillian Kinzie
June 25, 2020

NSSE Institute The Spring 2020 disruption caused by the coronavirus affected every aspect of undergraduate education, including our best laid assessment plans. Rapidly changed circumstances prompted the addition of an asterisk to information associated with the spring term, including semester grade records, end of course evaluations, licensure exam scores, and assessment data, among others. Adding lengthy, descriptive footnotes to reports and files […]

Save the Data: Crisis and Survey Management

Kyle Fassett
June 4, 2020

At the Association for Institution Research (AIR) annual forum in Denver, CO, my colleague, Allison BrckaLorenz, and I led a discussion on managing data during crises. Institutional researchers are often responsible for sound data collection and tracking enrollment patterns thus it is crucial to consider how crises may hinder or improve projections. The session was rooted in a study that examined institutions […]

The Role of Faculty in Seniors’ Sense of Belonging

May 28, 2020

In an article published in Higher Education Research & Development, we used NSSE data to explore how senior students' faculty-related engagement influences their sense of belonging, particularly when it comes to feeling accepted and valued by professors, administrators, and staff. Authored by NSSE Research Scientist Angie Miller, along with graduate students Latosha Williams and Samantha Silberstein, our study incorporated a subsample of NSSE seniors […]

Residential Learning Communities Continue to Prove Effective in Engaging Students

Polly Graham, Robert Gonyea, and Kevin Fosnacht
May 22, 2020

According to a recent article published in Learning Communities Research and Practice, residential learning communities (RLCs; also known as Living-Learning Communities) continue to live up to their hype. RLCs have been touted as a best practice due to their high success rate in drawing students into the types of activities that lead to success in college. Considering […]

“Y’all are not here for us. Step it up.”

Allison BrckaLorenz
May 19, 2020

Current literature underscores the need to address unwelcoming campus climates for LGBQ+ students both in and outside of the classroom by taking a critical look at the practices adopted at the institution. Using a large-scale, multi-institution quantitative and qualitative data set, NSSE researchers presented a study at the 2019 Association for the Study of Higher Education that examined student perceptions of the inclusion of […]

Right-wing On Campus: Conservative Student Engagement

Brendan Dugan
May 15, 2020

The American public – and conservatives in particular – express dismay over the role of higher education institutions (Brown 2018), citing professors bringing their political views into the classroom (liberal bias) and too great an emphasis being placed on protecting students from potentially offensive views (dampening free speech). Conservative pundits often decry highly publicized events, such as the cancellation of a speech by Ann […]

From Respondent to Researcher: Reflections on NSSE

Angie Miller
May 12, 2020

I've had a lot of opportunities for reflection recently, given the 20-year anniversary of NSSE and my own 15-year college reunion. My first encounter with NSSE was in 2004 as a respondent, during my senior year at Hanover College. One day on my way back from class, I stopped at the Campus Center to check my mailbox and pulled out the NSSE survey (it […]

Cross-Sectional Data Uses

Kyle Fassett
May 8, 2020

At the 2019 Assessment Institute in Indianapolis, research analyst Allison BrckaLorenz and I presented on the challenges and benefits of cross-sectional data. We discussed with the audience several examples of research from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), the Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE), and the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE). While longitudinal data is advantageous for observing trends […]