Transcript Student Experiences with Information Technology and their

Getting Faculty Involved in the
Student Engagement Conversation:
The Faculty Survey of Student Engagement
Presentation at the Assessment Institute
Indianapolis, IN, October, 30, 2006
Faculty Survey
of Student Engagement
Thomas F. Nelson Laird,
Susan D. Johnson
Amanda Suniti Niskodé
Indiana University Bloomington
QUIZ QUESTION:
 Faculty members expect students to study
nearly
as much as students actually
reported:
A) Twice
B) Three times
C) Four times
QUIZ QUESTION:
 Full-time faculty in the 2006 FSSE spent what
percentage of their time teaching?
A) 43%
B) 55%
C) 110% (Wow!!!)
D) 60%
Overview
 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE)
 What We’ve Learned from FSSE
 Interesting findings and selected results
 How Institutions Can Use FSSE
 Examples of campus uses
 Combining NSSE-BCSSE-FSSE
data sets
 Small Group Discussions
Assessing
Student Engagement
 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
 Annual survey of first-year students and seniors at four-year institutions
that measures students’ participation in educational experiences that
prior research has connected to valued outcomes
 Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE)
 Parallel survey designed to measure faculty expectations for student
engagement in educational practices that are known to be empirically
linked with high levels of learning and development
 Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement (BCSSE)
 Survey administered in the fall of students’ first year designed to
measure students entering characteristics and the importance
they place on student engagement
Why FSSE?
 Institutions sought ways to include faculty in the
discussion of effective educational practices
 Several campuses demonstrated success with
homegrown faculty surveys that paralleled NSSE
 IU Center for Postsecondary Research pilot tested
a faculty survey in 2003 and launched in 2004
 It is important to understand faculty expectations
and perceptions as institutions seek to target
areas of improvement
QUIZ QUESTION:
What does FSSE help us learn?
A)
Faculty perceptions of how often their students engage in
different activities
B)
The importance faculty place on various
areas of learning and development
C)
Faculty’s opinions of the way
students dress these days!
D)
The nature and frequency of interactions faculty have with
students
E)
How faculty members organize class time
F)
Everything but C!
ANSWER: F!
FSSE Survey
 Faculty perceptions of how often their students
engage in different activities
 The importance faculty place on various areas of
learning and development
 The nature and frequency of interactions faculty
have with students
 How faculty members organize class time
FSSE Registration
 Four-year colleges and universities are eligible to take
part if they are concurrently participating or have
participated in NSSE in the previous year
 Online registration at www.fsse.iub.edu
 Can also link to FSSE registration after registering for NSSE
at www.nsse.iub.edu
 Registration open until late September
 Institutions provide:
 Institutional contact information
 Estimation of the number of faculty to be surveyed
QUIZ QUESTION:
Faculty Responses
 What makes it easier for faculty to respond to
FSSE?
FSSE Administration
 Third party administration--IU Center for Survey
Research
 Faculty surveyed in the spring
 Institutions choose faculty to be surveyed
 Administered online as a web-only survey
 Survey options
 Course-based questions
 Typical student questions
Course-Based Option
 Each faculty member responds to questions
about student engagement based on a course
taught during the current academic year
 Questions have appeared on previous
administrations of FSSE
Course-Based Option
Key Question
 Please respond to the following questions based on
one particular undergraduate course section you are
teaching or have taught this academic year
Level of students in your selected course section:
Lower division (mostly first-year students and sophomores)
Upper division (mostly juniors and seniors)
Other (please describe)
Course-Based Option
Example Question & Items
 About what percent of students in your
selected course section do the following?
(None, 1-24%, 25-49%, 50-74%, 75% or higher)
Frequently ask questions in class or contribute to
class discussions
Frequently come to class without completing
readings or assignments
Course-Based Option
Example Question & Items
 How often do students in your selected
course section engage in the following?
(Never, Sometimes, Often, Very often)
Receive prompt written or oral feedback from you
on their academic performance.
Have serious conversations in your course with
students of a different race or ethnicity than
Typical Student Option
 Each faculty member responds to questions
about student engagement based on the typical
first-year student or senior taught during the
current academic year
Typical Student Option
Key Question
 During the current academic year, have you had
more first-year students or seniors in your classes?
More first-year students than seniors
More seniors than first-year students
I have taught neither first-year students nor seniors this
academic year
Typical Student Option
Example Question & Items
 About how often has the typical [first-year student,
senior, student] done each of the following?
(Never, Sometimes, Often, Very often)
Asked questions in class or contributed to class discussions
Come to class without completing readings or assignments
Received prompt written or oral feedback from faculty on
his or her academic performance
Had serious conversations with students of a different race
or ethnicity than his or her own
FSSE Reporting
 Frequency Distributions
 Item-level frequencies
 NSSE/FSSE Report
 Student/faculty frequency
comparisons for similarly
worded items
 No institutional comparisons
 Annual Report (FSSE is a
component of the NSSE
annual report)
QUIZ QUESTION:
FSSE 2006
 In 2006, how many institutions participated in
FSSE?
A) 10 
B) 934
C) 131
D) 57
 ANSWER: 131 institutions!!!
 20% doctoral, 45% master’s, 35% baccalaureate
 52% private
FSSE 2006
 Over 21,000 faculty respondents
 46% women
 16% faculty of color
 23% Professor, 22% Associate, 25% Assistant,
22% Lecturer/Instructor, 7% other
 Average institutional response rate = 54%
What We’ve Learned
from FSSE
aching
search
her
Time Spent on Overall
Activities
FSSE
FSSE
National
Other
22%
Other
25%
Research
15%
National
Teaching
Research
Teaching Other
60%
Teaching
54%
Research
24%
Time Spent Preparing for Class
 Upper-division faculty members responses to how much time
students are expected to spend and how much time students
actually spent preparing for their courses
 How much time seniors reported spending preparing for class
(from NSSE 2006)
 Faculty members expect students to study nearly twice as
much as students actually reported
 Between the Physical Sciences and Education, difference in
expectation nearly 2 hours, while difference in time spent by
seniors a little more than half an hour
Students Don’t Always Meet
Expectations: Time Studying
Time Spent Lecturing
 Across course levels, Biological/Life Sciences,
Physical Sciences, and Engineering faculty report
spending a greater percentage of time (between
57% and 62%) lecturing while Education faculty
spend the smallest percentage of time (around
26%)
Illustrating How
Class Time is Spent
100%
9%
90%
80%
19%
29%
70%
60%
15%
19%
50%
40%
30%
26%
57%
20%
26%
10%
0%
Engineering
Education
Other
Experiential
Small Group Work
Lecturing
Differences in Deep Learning
 Combination of 3 subscales measuring the emphasis faculty
place on higher level thinking, reflecting on one’s own
learning, and incorporating information and ideas from
multiple sources into one’s own thinking and work
 Higher-order learning
 Integrative learning
 Reflective learning
 Faculty in engineering and physical sciences place less
emphasis; conversely, faculty in arts and humanities and
education appear to place greater emphasis on deep learning
Disciplinary Differences in
Emphasizing Deep Learning
Soft
Hard
Faculty Do Matter!
 On campuses where faculty place greater
emphasis on or require more use of effective
educational practices, students do more
 Faculty emphasis on one area of effective
educational practice (e.g., active and
collaborative learning) is connected to student
use of effective educational practices in other
areas as well as improved student outcomes
(see Kuh, Nelson Laird, & Umbach, 2004; Umbach & Wawrzynski, 2005)
How Institutions Use
FSSE
Campus Uses of FSSE
 Schools use FSSE results in many ways, including:
 Faculty development programs
 Faculty workshops and retreats
 Scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL)
 Assessment and improvement
 Institutional research
 Curricular reform
 Accreditation and self-studies
BCSSE-FSSE-NSSE
Combinations
 Brigham Young University (BYU) and Radford
University compare students’ descriptions of their
academic experiences (NSSE) with the
expectations described prior to starting classes
(BCSSE)
 FSSE responses will make it possible to examine
faculty perceptions alongside student experiences
 BYU’s Faculty Center will report findings during
faculty training and internal workshops
BCSSE-FSSE-NSSE
Combinations
 University of Maine at Farmington (UMF) will
triangulate data from all three surveys
 Established a baseline which to assess the impact
of its shift from a three-credit to a four-credit
model for full-semester courses
 This strategy will help UMF
 Identify concerns that may emerge from the shift
 Administrators assess the effectiveness of these
efforts
Small Group Discussion
Guiding Questions
 How does your campus incorporate faculty
information into its assessment program?
 How would/do you use results like those in this
presentation on your campus?
 To whom should this information be presented on
your campus?
Assessment Items and
Presentation Feedback
If you were running the Faculty
Survey of Student Engagement,
what questions would you ask
about classroom activities and
faculty practices?
For More Information
 Email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
 FSSE website: http://www.fsse.iub.edu
 NSSE website: http://www.nsse.iub.edu
Copies of papers and presentations, including
this one, as well as annual reports and other
information are available through the websites