Students learn more when they devote substantial amounts of time and effort to educationally purposeful activities. This deceptively simple premise, today widely known as student engagement, is not new. George Kuh, director of Indiana University Bloomington's Center for Postsecondary Research, said scholars are on their third and fourth generation of the concept.
So why all the buzz about Kuh's National Survey of Student Engagement and its high school version, the High School Survey of Student Engagement? National education writers are flooded with education surveys for their consideration – with most ending up in the circular file -- yet they give ink to these two surveys. Hundreds of universities and a growing number of high schools pay to participate in the surveys each year.
Both surveys address a pressing need for educational institutions to go behind the growing number of university rankings and standardized tests to see what students really are doing – and then to use the information to change policies and practices to help their students get more out of school. So far, the surveys have reached nearly 900,000 students at four-year colleges and institutions and 180,000 high school students.
“Most are authentically committed to change,” says Kuh of the colleges that use the survey to peer into the lives of their students.
The results point to some reasons to celebrate – such as an increasing number of college seniors who participate in service-learning projects – and certain alarming findings – such as the HSSSE discovery that four-fifths of high school students spend only three hours or less per week reading assigned materials for all their classes.
“Student engagement data are powerful because schools can use the findings right away to make improvements, often at little expense,” says Martha McCarthy, director of HSSSE.
McCarthy and Kuh are both Chancellors' Professors of Education and recipients of Indiana University 's prestigious Tracy Sonneborn Award.
NSSE and related projects at the Center for Postsecondary Research have followed a meteoric trajectory from the idea stage to a student engagement think tank, growing from a staff of just two people in 1999 to 40 faculty, staff, and graduate student research assistants today. Fueled by several million dollars of grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts and Lumina Foundation for Education, the center has spun off complementary versions of NSSE, including HSSSE, surveys for community-college students and law students, and a survey of university student engagement from the perspective of the faculty, all of which are self-supporting by institutional user fees. The NSSE Institute for Effective Educational Practice is the center's service arm, and institute associates work with colleges and universities and prominent educational organizations to discover promising policies and practices and assist institutions in using them more effectively. Among the iinstitute's partners are the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College , and the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning. Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter , published by Jossey-Bass, is the latest fruit of these efforts. The book features 20 diverse colleges and universities that do a noteworthy job helping their students succeed.
HSSSE soon will be under the direction of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at IUB. The community-college survey is administered by the University of Texas in Austin .
To learn more about NSSE and HSSSE, please visit http://nsse.iub.edu/html/quick_facts.htm (for NSSE) and http://www.iub.edu/~nsse/hssse/ (for HSSSE).
The latest findings for these surveys can be found at these sites and also at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1723.html (for NSSE) and http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/2338.html (for HSSSE).
The 2005 NSSE findings will be released November 7, 2005.
