The NSSE Institute promotes effective educational practice and helps institutions use student engagement results to improve teaching and learning. To this end, we work with a variety of organizations and institutions to convene stakeholders for institutes and workshops to explore projects of mutual interest, consult with institutions and systems, and examine ways to use data to improve the undergraduate student experience. We also conduct research and development consistent with NSSE’s mission, such as the research projects described below.
NSSEpartnered with theGates Foundation to explore how student voice can more authentically inform higher education research, assessment, and institutional improvement.Informed by consultations with Gates-affiliated organizations on how they understand andutilizestudent voice, NSSE worked to develop a framework to help colleges and universities rethinkthe waysthey listen tostudents, learn fromthem, and actupontheir perspectives.This collaborationextendsNSSE’s long-standing commitment to elevating student perspectives as essential evidence of educational quality and supporting institutions invested inequitableand responsive approaches to student success.
This project funds the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to provide technical assistance and capability-building services and support to the institutions and intermediaries of the Higher Endeavor ecosystem, and the Gates Foundation’s mission of advancing equity-driven outcomes and organizational change with intermediaries, institutions and ecosystem partners.
NSSE's supports data-informed postsecondary improvement through our service model, which combines data curation, evidence use, and capacity building alongside a relationship-driven approach focused on collaboration, trust and long-term partnership. By working alongside intermediaries, institutions and ecosystem partners, NSSE will help organizations translate student voice, experience and engagement data into actionable insights, align and embed assessment practices in organizational processes around data-use, and assist in scaling effective data-practices across the ecosystem.
The goal of the Advancing Rural Student Success project is to help college and universities improve the conditions and outcomes for rural learners. Its unique contribution is owing to its broad, multi-institutional research design, extensive student identity characteristics, and actionable data centered in students’ behavior and perceptions about educational experiences. Importantly, it simultaneously provides robust student-level descriptive data, and comparative institution-level evidence to empirically identify institutions that serve rural students at high levels.
The following objectives guide our project:
1)Leverage student-level data for deeper, nuanced depictions of rural learners’ college experiences and perceptions, disaggregated by a range of social identities.
2)Analyze institution-level data from hundreds of institutions, to explore how colleges and universities are engaging rural learners at comparatively high levels, and identify rural-serving exemplars.
3) Generate rigorous knowledge, portable insight, and actionable recommendations for improving student and institutional dimensions of rural postsecondary education at local, state, and national levels.
Research Design & Questions
This project involves conducting quantitative, descriptive and correlational methodologies with data collected from NSSE, a large-scale, multi-institution survey. We will combine variable-centered analyses to show the strength of relationships between constructs with person-centered analyses to distinguish subgroups of rural learners. Quantitative findings will be validated through sense-making discussions with practitioners and administrators at participating institutions.
NSSE data from the 2023-2025 administrations will be used to examine rural learners’ social identities, experiences of student engagement and characteristics of the institutions at which they enroll. We will use NSSE’s 5-digit ZIP code of students home address during their last year of high school matched to ZIP codes identified as rural by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy. Using these definitions, we have over 43,150 rural learners enrolled at 687 institutions. The institutions at which rural learners enroll are also important, and we will use the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges’ (AARC) RSI score for institutions as an external measure of institutions’ rural-servingness to add context to our identification of exemplar institutions. Our research questions are:
Who are today’s rural learners in higher education by social identities and characteristics?
What characterizes the 4-year institutions at which rural learners enroll?
What do rural learners experience in college in terms of student engagement?
How do practitioners and administrators make sense of rural data and findings?
Ensuring that all college and university graduates are equipped with work-relevant skills and competencies demands novel institution and system-level initiatives that strengthen career education in the curriculum and co-curriculum. The effectiveness of these efforts is contingent on access to current information about students and educators career education experiences and institutions capacity to use data to inform their enhancements. Results from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Career & Workforce Preparation (CWP) Topical Module can inform higher education and institutions’ improvement of students’ career preparation experiences and post-collegiate career outcomes.
The overall goals for the Project for Data-Informed Career Advancement, include:
Develop strategies to support campuses in using NSSE CWP data to evaluate students’ experiences outcomes, assess and improve campuses practices and support.
Cultivate a robust data landscape related to students’ experiences and outcomes, faculty and institutional practices and strategies related to career pathways.
Direct and inform intermediary organizations’ strategies related to improving career and workforce outcomes and/or supporting colleges and universities related to career outcomes.
We are partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide a review and recommendations for the update of the Institutional Transformation Assessment (ITA). This work includes the next phase of testing, refinement and scaling of the ITA tool applying a mix of evidence from previous tests, user feedback, expert input, scholarly review, collaborative testing and editing to ensure relevant content.
This enhancement process will include specific attention to race and socioeconomic equity and rubric refinement based on survey design principles. The project will result in recommendations for revised indicators and a planned process for future revision across rubrics and associated tools, findings about performance and utilization, and documentation of key changes.
The coronavirus upended all aspects of education. The 2020–21 academic year required rapid adaptation to unprecedented and unpredictable circumstances. Amidst these circumstances, it was especially important to understand students' experiences and support educators working to implement effective educational practices. In response to these challenges, NSSE offered a special fall 2020 survey at no charge (NSSE 2021 registration not required). The short online survey—NSSE Pulse—included selected questions from NSSE critical to persistence to help colleges and universities take the pulse of the undergraduate student experience and use results to diagnose shortcomings and strengths and to inform campus action.
Approximately 1.2 million bachelor’s degree-seeking students attend the colleges and universities that participated in NSSE Pulse. These institutions reflect the diversity of U.S. bachelor’s-granting colleges and universities with respect to institution type, public or private control, size, region, and locale.Eight headline findings are discussed in the NSSE Pulse Report, along with implications and recommendations for colleges and universities.
This project is a collaboration between NSSE and Strada Education Network (Strada) to address the current interest in work and career preparation by gathering data and developing assessment tools, reports and resources to assist colleges and universities and interested stakeholders learn more about the state of work and career preparation in undergraduate education. Specifically, we will develop a survey to be offered as a topical module available to 4-year colleges and universities participating in NSSE to ask undergraduates about how the college experience prepares them for work and careers.
This project seeks to facilitate and enhance the assessment of High-Impact Practices (HIPs) for quality and equity at bachelor’s degree-granting colleges and universities through the development of a new set of survey items to assess HIP experiences, and to create and test additional HIP item sets and new survey approaches.
This study examines the relationships between students' residential conditions, their engagement, and ultimately their persistence for first-year and sophomore students attending 75 U.S. institutions. The study combines data from NSSE, a special set of NSSE questions on students’ living arrangements, the ACUHO-I Campus Housing Index, and persistence data from the National Student Clearinghouse.
This partnership between NSSE and the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE) at The University of Texas at Austin, with support from the Kresge Foundation and the Greater Texas Foundation, focuses on building and extending the knowledge base on the largest underserved, underrepresented, and fastest-growing minority population in the US. Following analyses of survey data on the experiences of Latinos in community colleges and bachelor’s institutions, an intensive 2½ day institute, in collaboration with Excelencia in Education, will provide partner institutions with actionable information and strategies for strengthening the engagement experiences of Latino students and facilitating their successful transfer and college completion.
Using multi-year data from NSSE, this study identifies institutions that show a pattern of positive improvement on a robust set of measures of effective educational practice over at least four observations. Then, to inquire into the institutional change process, the study uses a mixed-methods approach to document institutional improvement and change initiatives in higher education—as well as contributing to the literature and current discussions about educational reform.
NSSE collaborated with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) on an initiative examining the daily activities of educationally effective colleges and universities in order to understand what they do to promote student success. Case studies of 20 high-performing colleges and universities of various sizes and types provided information regarding their higher-than-predicted graduation rates and higher-than-predicted scores on five NSSE clusters of effective educational practice.
BEAMS, a 5-year initiative to improve retention, achievement, and institutional effectiveness at Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), entailed institutions using evidence from NSSE and other sources to analyze the scope and character of students' engagement in their learning. Results included institutions implementing action plans to improve engagement, learning, persistence, and success.
This initiative involves the Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC) continued work with a consortium of institutions using a specific instrument, the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), combined with NSSE to understand educational and programmatic features associated with gains in students’ analytical reasoning, critical thinking, and writing skills.
NSSE is being used with cohorts of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNSLAE), a longitudinal assessment of liberal arts outcomes, to explore the relationship between engagement and a variety of outcomes measures.
This Penn State project uses NSSE and other data to map the comprehensive influences affecting student learning and persistence during the first year among new students entering 34 institutions nationwide. The study examines first-year student success as it is shaped by students’ experiences; the peer environment; faculty members’ values and activities; and internal institutional structures, practices, and policies.
