January 5, 2007
By Colleen MacPherson
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Polischuk |
The results of a recent major survey show that students at the University of Saskatchewan are experiencing the same levels of engagement with their institution as their peers at other Canadian schools, including many that fall into the medical/doctoral category of the annual Macleans rankings.
The Integrated Planning Office has just released an executive summary of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) conducted by Indiana University’s Centre for Postsecondary Research. A first-time participant, the U of S was one of 557 institutions whose students were asked to rate their engagement level in five key areas – academic challenge, active and collaborative learning, student-faculty interaction, enriching educational experiences, and supportive campus environment.
For Barrie Dubray, assistant provost Integrated Planning and Analysis, the results allow the University “to look at our experience relative to, first, our Canadian peer group, and then the larger group.” And on the whole, the differences are small.
As with virtually every other Canadian institution, senior students at the U of S are more engaged than their first-year counterparts, said Carisa Polischuk, an IPO research analyst who prepared the summary. The supportive campus environment benchmark was the only one in which the score for both groups – senior and first-year students – was almost the same.
Polischuk explained 2,506 of 4,578 randomly selected first-year and graduating students did the online survey early in 2006. One significant result is that the University’s 55 per cent participation rate was 20 per cent higher than the average response rate.
First-year students here scored higher than their Canadian peers in three specific areas of engagement – receiving prompt feedback from faculty on their academic performance, participation in physical fitness activity, and attending class with completed readings and assignments. They scored lower than other Canadian students in indicators like coursework that emphasizes organizing ideas, information or experiences into new interpretations and relationships; making class presentations; and using an electronic medium.
Participation in community-based projects, using computing and information technology, and solving complex real-world problems are examples of where senior U of S students beat out other Canadian students. They scored below their peers in areas like using an electronic medium, having serious conversations with students of a different race or ethnicity, and foreign language coursework.
Dubray suggested the lower levels of engagement for first-year senior students might reflect their unfamiliarity with the university system or large class sizes. “Now we need to dig a little deeper and ask why this is happening and what we’re going to do about it. These results are reasonably consistent with what we expected but it certainly signals there’s room for improvement.”
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Dubray |
He added the survey results will provide “important input into the Teaching and Learning Foundational Document” as well as add to the wealth of information being collected by the IPO in preparation for the University’s upcoming planning process.
“Our objective is to bring together different threads of information from various surveys and provide a bit of a clearinghouse of information. Our hope is that we can get full value for the investment in this and other surveys by keeping the results together with those of other surveys. We will also then be ready to apply key findings of this survey and other surveys to emerging issues that come out of the next Integrated Planning cycle.”
The U of S does not plan to participate in NSSE annually, said Polischuk. The choice to be involved in 2006 was made when Ontario’s new accountability framework mandated all of that province’s universities participate, giving the U of S a strong peer group for comparison purposes. Besides, “things don’t change that quickly,” said Dubray. “The U of S is looking to be part of the 2008 NSSE survey when many of our medical/doctoral peer institutions are again scheduled to be involved.”
The cost of participating is about $9,000.
The NSSE summary document along with a sample of the survey instrument can be found on the Integrated Planning link at usask.ca/vpacademic
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